United States v. Wilkie, Edward L. , 182 F. App'x 533 ( 2006 )


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  •                               UNPUBLISHED ORDER
    Not to be cited per Circuit Rule 53
    United States Court of Appeals
    For the Seventh Circuit
    Chicago, Illinois 60604
    Argued April 19, 2006
    Decided May 5, 2006
    Before
    Hon. JOHN L. COFFEY, Circuit Judge
    Hon. FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge
    Hon. DANIEL A. MANION, Circuit Judge
    Nos. 05-2878 & 05-3155
    Appeals from the United States District
    UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,                      Court for the Southern District of
    Plaintiff-Appellee,                        Indiana, Terre Haute Division
    v.                                       No. 04 CR 11
    EDWARD L. WILKIE and                           Larry J. McKinney,
    MICHAEL D. CLARK,                              Chief Judge.
    Defendants-Appellants.
    ORDER
    Edward Wilkie and Michael Clark challenge the denial of their motion to
    suppress drugs seized during a traffic stop. Their sole argument is that the officers
    unreasonably prolonged the stop beyond its “limited purpose.” We affirm.
    I.
    The facts are not here disputed. On June 17, 2004, Sam Sellers, an officer of
    the Greencastle, Indiana Police Department, and Heath Kerns, an officer of the
    nearby Roachdale Police Department, were patrolling on a special traffic
    enforcement detail on Interstate 70. Also in the car was Sellers’s assigned K-9,
    Jasper. At 2:09 a.m. the officers stopped a Ford F-150 truck driven by Wilkie
    because his license plate was not properly illuminated as required by 
    Ind. Code § 9
    -
    Nos. 05-2878 & 05-3155                                                          Page 2
    19-6-4(e). Clark was Wilkie’s sole passenger. A camera mounted on Sellers’s
    dashboard recorded subsequent events although there is no audio.1
    As the officers approached the truck they observed four suitcases in the open
    bed of the truck (a fifth was later found in the extended cab) and eight or nine tree-
    shaped air fresheners hanging in the cab, most of them on the rear-view mirror.
    Sellers said he noticed “Clark’s breathing was labored and [his] carotid artery
    pulsating.” Wilkie gave Sellers the truck registration and part of a torn
    Pennsylvania driver’s license. In part to protect himself from passing traffic,
    Sellers ordered Wilkie to stand with him between their two vehicles while he
    collected information missing from the license that was needed to determine its
    validity. While Wilkie gave Sellers the missing information, Kerns returned to the
    police cruiser to summon backup. Wilkie told Sellers that he and Clark were
    driving home to New York from San Diego, where they had been visiting Clark’s
    brother for three days.
    Six minutes into the stop Sellers finished talking to Wilkie. Rather than
    immediately calling dispatch to validate Wilkie’s license, Sellers told Wilkie to wait
    by the cruiser and went to speak with Clark who was still trying to locate proof of
    insurance, which he never located. On the video it appears that eight or nine more
    minutes passed before Sellers finished talking to Clark—their conversation was
    interrupted for a few minutes when Sellers left Clark to confer with Officer
    Simmons of the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department, who had just arrived in
    response to Kerns’s call. Clark told Sellers that he and Wilkie had spent five days
    in San Diego, but did not mention visiting his brother; he said they stayed at a
    hotel. The officers apparently spent another five minutes conferring before Sellers
    retrieved Jasper from his police cruiser and, eighteen to twenty minutes into the
    stop, ordered him to sniff around the truck. Jasper almost immediately alerted at
    the back of the vehicle, and a search of the four suitcases in the bed of the truck and
    a fifth suitcase in the cab revealed 66 kilograms of marijuana. At 2:31, just after
    the marijuana was discovered, Sellers called in Wilkie’s license information for
    validation.2 Officers with a warrant later discovered three kilograms of cocaine in a
    false spare tire.
    The relevant portion of the video is obscured by condensation on the
    1
    windshield.
    2
    The government was unable to give the precise time of the call until after the
    suppression hearing, but submitted the dispatch run sheet before the district judge
    issued his decision.
    Nos. 05-2878 & 05-3155                                                         Page 3
    Wilkie and Clark moved to suppress the drugs, arguing as relevant to this
    appeal that their detention was unreasonable in scope and duration. The district
    court found that “[u]pon initial approach and contact with the occupants of the
    truck, several intervening circumstances gave rise to a reasonable and articulable
    suspicion of criminal activity.” Specifically, the court relied on: the defendants
    slowing below the speed limit, the eight or nine air fresheners, Clark’s nervousness,
    the four suitcases in the truck’s bed, and Wilkie’s torn driver’s license. The
    disparity between Wilkie’s and Clark’s account of their trip, the court further found,
    “added to the reasonable suspicion developed.”
    II.
    On appeal, Wilkie and Clark admit that their license plate was not
    illuminated and that this allowed Sellers to stop them. They also concede—as they
    must after Ill. v. Caballes, 
    543 U.S. 405
     (2005)—that Sellers needed nothing more
    to deploy Jasper to sniff around their truck. But almost twenty minutes passed
    before Jasper indicated the presence of drugs and, they assert, much of that delay
    was unrelated to the stop’s “limited purpose”—issuing a warning or citation for the
    traffic infraction. And because Sellers’s observations during that time never yielded
    a reasonable suspicion of any crime other than the traffic infraction, they contend,
    the stop became unreasonably long in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The
    government cannot explain why Sellers waited instead of immediately deploying
    Jasper, but defends the district court’s determination that reasonable suspicion
    justified the delay.
    When reviewing the denial of a motion to suppress we review questions of
    law de novo and findings of fact for clear error. United States v. Mendoza, 
    438 F.3d 792
    , 795 (7th Cir. 2006). The premise of the parties’ arguments is that Terry v.
    Ohio, 
    392 U.S. 1
     (1968), governs police conduct during a traffic stop supported by
    probable cause to believe the vehicle’s occupants have committed a traffic
    infraction. However, such stops are arrests, Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, 
    532 U.S. 318
    , 354 (2001); Whren v. United States, 
    517 U.S. 806
    , 809-10 (1996), and we have
    rejected the premise that Terry governs them, United States v. Childs, 
    277 F.3d 947
    , 952-54 (7th Cir. 2002) (en banc); see also United States v. Carpenter, 
    406 F.3d 915
    , 916 (7th Cir. 2005). Though arresting officers may not unreasonably prolong a
    traffic stop with questions unrelated to the stop’s purpose, “[q]uestions that hold
    potential for detecting crime, yet create little or no inconvenience, do not turn
    reasonable detention into unreasonable detention.” Childs, 
    277 F.3d at 954
    .
    Wilkie and Clark are partly to blame for the length of the stop. Because
    Wilkie’s license was missing information, Sellers had to ask him additional
    questions to determine whether it was valid. And Clark spent several minutes
    unsuccessfully trying to locate proof of insurance. The two contend that they were
    Nos. 05-2878 & 05-3155                                                            Page 4
    not required to carry proof of insurance because they were not from Indiana, and
    that the time Clark spent looking for the papers made the stop unreasonable. But
    Clark was free to tell the officers he did not have proof of insurance or could not
    locate it. See Childs, 
    277 F.3d at 954
     (“all suspects . . . may protect themselves fully
    by declining to answer”). The delay was caused by Clark’s search for the papers,
    not Sellers’s request for them. The officers prolonged the stop in talking to Clark
    and conferring with one another, but the incremental delay to investigate possible
    drug trafficking was too small an inconvenience to make the lawful arrest
    unreasonably long. See id.; United States v. Martin, 
    422 F.3d 597
    , 601-02 (7th Cir.
    2005); United States v. Muriel, 
    418 F.3d 720
    , 725 (7th Cir. 2005); Carpenter, 
    406 F.3d at 916-17
    . It was therefore unnecessary for the district court to decide
    whether circumstances beyond the traffic infraction justified the officers’ conduct.
    Even if the traffic infraction alone was insufficient to justify the length of the
    stop, however, the district court was right that the length of the stop was
    reasonable in light of the circumstances that developed. That a defendant
    “appeared nervous” is a subjective impression that we have held contributes
    nothing to the objective basis for suspecting criminal activity, see United States v.
    Broomfield, 
    417 F.3d 654
    , 655 (7th Cir. 2005) (collecting cases), and this must
    remain true notwithstanding an officer’s attempt to recast his subjective
    impressions in objective-sounding terms like “labored breathing” or “pulsating
    carotid artery.” Likewise, that a person slows below the speed limit after passing
    police adds nothing to a stop’s objective basis. 
    Id.
     The district court should not
    have given these observations any weight.
    Nevertheless other circumstances that arose before Sellers finished taking
    Wilkie’s license information established a reasonable basis for suspecting that he
    and Clark were transporting drugs. Wilkie told Sellers they had driven
    cross-country from New York to San Diego for just a three-day visit. See United
    States v. Currency, U.S. $42,500.00, 
    283 F.3d 977
    , 981 (9th Cir. 2002) (giving weight
    to fact that claimant was “traveling from New York to San Diego, well known
    source cities for drugs”). For this brief trip the two defendants had five suitcases
    between them. Moreover, there were eight or nine air fresheners hanging in the
    cab. See United States v. Patterson, 
    65 F.3d 68
    , 71 (7th Cir. 1995) (smell of air
    freshener added to probable cause); see also United States v. Fuse, 
    391 F.3d 924
    ,
    929-30 (8th Cir. 2004) (smell of air freshener added to reasonable suspicion); United
    States v. Foreman, 
    369 F.3d 776
    , 784 (4th Cir. 2004) (several air fresheners hanging
    from rearview mirror added to reasonable suspicion). United States v. West, 
    219 F.3d 1171
    , 1178-79 (10th Cir. 2000) (“[t]he scent of air freshener is properly
    considered as a factor in the probable cause analysis”). These objective facts made
    it reasonable for Sellers to briefly detain Wilkie and Clark for questioning and,
    when their answers did not dispel his suspicions, to detain them a little longer to
    deploy Jasper.
    Nos. 05-2878 & 05-3155                                                        Page 5
    But, Wilkie and Clark persist in arguing, there was nothing to consider
    suspicious because any disparity in their stories is attributable to the framing of
    Sellers’s questions. The amount of luggage wasn’t suspicious, they posit, because
    Sellers testified that he might not have found the same amount unusual if Wilkie
    and Clark were women. Last, no court has relied on the mere presence of air
    fresheners, they assert: it is the smell of air freshener that is probative of drug
    trafficking. But Sellers testified that he asked Wilkie and Clark identical questions
    and nothing in the record contradicts him. As to the amount of luggage, the reason
    Sellers found it suspicious is irrelevant; all that matters is whether it was unusual
    enough to be objectively probative of drug trafficking. See Foreman, 
    369 F.3d at 781
    . Finally, at least one circuit has held that the presence of air fresheners added
    to reasonable suspicion. Foreman, 
    369 F.3d at 784
    . In light of the other
    circumstances the air fresheners were surely suspicious here even though nobody
    testified (or was asked) about their scent.
    III.
    We AFFIRM the district court’s denial of the suppression motion because the
    traffic infraction alone justified the eighteen to twenty minute stop here. In any
    event, the district court was right that the stop was not too long in light of the
    circumstances that developed.