United States v. Trujillo

993 F.3d 859

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellant,

v.Gabriel TRUJILLO, Defendant - Appellee.

No. 19-2212

United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.

FILED April 6, 2021

C. Paige Messec, Assistant United States Attorney (John C. Anderson, United States Attorney, with her on the briefs), Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Ryan J. Villa, The Law Office of Ryan J. Villa, Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before TYMKOVICH, Chief Judge, MURPHY, and HARTZ, Circuit Judges.

HARTZ, Circuit Judge.

The government appeals the district-court order granting Defendant Gabriel Trujillo's motion to suppress evidence recovered during an inventory search of his vehicle conducted in connection with the vehicle's impoundment following his arrest for failing to pull over in response to a police command. We hold that the search was justified as an exercise of law-enforcement community-caretaker functions, as described in South Dakota v. Opperman , 428 U.S. 364, 368, 96 S.Ct. 3092, 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976), and Cady v. Dombrowski , 413 U.S. 433, 93 S.Ct. 2523, 37 L.Ed.2d 706 (1973). Exercising jurisdiction under 18 U.S.C. § 3731, we reverse the district court and remand for further proceedings.

I. BACKGROUND

Unless otherwise noted, our recitation of events reflects the findings of the district court and facts undisputed by the parties on appeal. In the early hours of December 6, 2017, Bernalillo County Deputy Sheriff Mitchell Skroch was on patrol in the South Valley area of Albuquerque, New Mexico. At 2:41 a.m. he observed a dark-colored Ford Mustang traveling westbound on Central Avenue at about 60 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone. Deputy Skroch initiated pursuit and engaged his emergency lights. When the Mustang failed to stop, Skroch activated his siren. But the Mustang still did not pull over, continuing to drive but slowing to about the speed limit. Skroch followed the Mustang as it turned to go southbound on Unser Boulevard and then to go eastbound on Bridge Boulevard. He saw the Mustang's driver reach his left hand out the driver's side window and appear to sprinkle something onto the road. He also observed the Mustang unlawfully crossing solid white lines on the roadway. Finally, after Skroch had pursued it for about 1.3 miles, the Mustang came to a stop in front of the entrance to a gated community. The gate was set back from Bridge Boulevard, with a raised median separating incoming and outgoing traffic. On the median, which extended several yards back from the gate toward the street (running about halfway down the entryway), was a keypad used by residents to enter the code opening the gate. The car stopped on the right side of the entryway, just before the median. It was set off from the curb by a few feet, with its rear end angled slightly to the left, away from the curb.

Once the car was stopped, Skroch—who had been joined by a deputy responding to Skroch's calls over the radio—ordered Defendant to exit and walk back to the deputies, where he was placed in handcuffs. While looking through the car windows for additional occupants, Skroch spotted in plain view inside the car a holstered Glock handgun tucked between the driver's seat and the center console, a holstered Sig Sauer handgun, and a rifle case on the back seat.

After being read his Miranda warnings, Defendant stated that he had not pulled over when Skroch first activated his emergency equipment because he was looking for a safe place to do so. Skroch found this explanation unlikely because Defendant had passed "multiple safe spots to pull over," including well-lit shoulders on the side of the road. Aplt. App., Vol. II at 169–70. Defendant told Skroch that he had purchased the car three days earlier but had not yet changed the registration. He also stated that he was wearing a bullet-proof vest and had the handguns in the car for protection because friends of his ex-girlfriend had made threats against his life.

Disbelieving Defendant's explanation for why he had failed to pull over earlier, Skroch decided to arrest him. Consistent with the policy of the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office (BCSO), Skroch also determined that the car should be impounded and towed. The policy required that a vehicle be towed when the driver had been arrested and there was no registered owner to take custody.¹ And Skroch thought it would be dangerous to leave the vehicle where it was, both because its location presented a danger to other drivers and because of the risk that someone would remove the firearms, particularly because there was a high incidence of auto burglaries and thefts in the area.

The BCSO works with several different on-call tow services, all of which transport vehicles to a private tow yard that contracts with the BCSO. Before towing Defendant's car—and again consistent with department policy—Skroch performed an inventory of its contents. In addition to the two handguns he had observed from outside the car (both of which were loaded), he found a loaded Sig Sauer assault-style rifle inside the hard rifle case he had seen on the back seat and found a second rifle case underneath the first, this one containing a loaded Wasser AK-47 rifle. Skroch then defeated a small luggage lock securing a camouflage backpack in the back seat and opened it, discovering another handgun with ammunition, a shotgun-shell box containing four bundles of U.S. currency, and four individually wrapped balls of a white crystalline substance that he believed to be methamphetamine. Skroch contacted a deputy attached to the narcotics unit, who prepared a search warrant that was later signed by a state district judge. Deputies executed the search warrant but did not find anything else of significance.

The white crystalline substance contained in the four balls—which weighed a total of about half a pound—was field-tested as positive for methamphetamine. Also, it was later determined that the car was registered to a person with the initials R.J. in Jarales, New Mexico.

Defendant was indicted in the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico on charges of (1) possession with intent to distribute at least 50 grams of a substance containing methamphetamine, see 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and (b)(1)(B) ; and (2) possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime, see 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). In his first motion to suppress he argued, among other things, that the evidence recovered during the inventory search should be suppressed on the ground that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the way the inventory search was conducted. After an evidentiary hearing at which Deputy Skroch and others testified, the district court denied Defendant's motion, determining that Skroch's search of the backpack "followed standardized criteria set forth by the [BCSO] and [Skroch] acted in good faith pursuant to those established policies." United States v. Trujillo , 341 F. Supp. 3d 1280, 1288 (D.N.M. 2018) ( Trujillo I ). The court noted that there was "no indication that Deputy Skroch's intent [in opening the backpack] was anything other than the purposes indicated in the [BCSO's] policies." Id .

Defendant then filed a second motion to suppress, which is the subject of this appeal. The motion challenged the validity not of the inventory search, but rather the impoundment itself. Defendant argued both that the BCSO's impoundment policy was itself unreasonable "because it permits impoundment in every case where the driver is arrested," contrary to precedents of the Supreme Court and this circuit, and that, "even if the [BCSO's impoundment policy] could be read differently, the warrantless impoundment in this case was unreasonable because there was no community-caretaker basis for impoundment and [the] officer failed to consider alternatives to towing." Aplt. App., Vol. I at 97. The district court held a second evidentiary hearing at which Skroch again testified.

The district court granted Defendant's motion and ordered the evidence suppressed. See United States v. Trujillo , 418 F. Supp. 3d 867, 876–79 (D.N.M. 2019) ( Trujillo II ). The court rejected the government's argument that the impoundment was justified under the community-caretaking rationale described by the Supreme Court in Opperman , holding that "the government ha[d] not carried its burden of showing that Deputy Skroch's decision to impound [Defendant's] car was justified by the need to protect public safety or to facilitate the flow of traffic." Trujillo II , 418 F. Supp. 3d at 876 ; see id . ("The instant case did not involve a vehicle stopped dangerously on the shoulder of a highway; disabled by an accident; left unattended, as in Opperman itself; or impeding traffic on a busy road."). Also, it determined that the presence of the firearms was "not a relevant consideration" in its analysis of the community-caretaking justification, citing testimony by Skroch that he made the decision to impound before seeing the firearms. Id .

The district court proceeded to consider the reasonableness of the impoundment under United States v. Sanders , 796 F.3d 1241 (10th Cir. 2015), in which we identified several factors to assist in determining whether an impoundment, though not authorized under Opperman , can nevertheless be justified on the basis of some other "reasonable, non-pretextual community-caretaking rationale." Id. at 1248. The court concluded that although Skroch made the decision to impound based upon a "standardized policy," the Government had "failed to carry its burden ... to demonstrate a reasonable, non-pretextual community-caretaking rationale justifying the decision to impound." Trujillo II , 418 F. Supp. 3d at 877. The two strongest factors weighing against reasonableness, according to the district court, were Skroch's failure to seek Defendant's consent to tow the car and his failure to consider "any alternatives to towing, such as allowing [Defendant] to arrange for someone else to pick up...