United States v. Joshua Brown ( 2023 )

United States Court of Appeals
For the Eighth Circuit
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No. 22-2133
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United States of America
Plaintiff - Appellee
v.
Joshua Brown
Defendant - Appellant
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Appeal from United States District Court
for the Northern District of Iowa - Cedar Rapids
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Submitted: January 11, 2023
Filed: February 27, 2023
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Before GRUENDER, BENTON, and SHEPHERD, Circuit Judges.
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GRUENDER, Circuit Judge.
Joshua Brown was pulled over while riding his motorcycle, and a pat-down
search revealed a firearm. After the district court1 denied his motion to suppress the
firearm, Brown conditionally pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon in
1
The Honorable C.J. Williams, United States District Judge for the Northern
District of Iowa.
violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). See Fed. R. Crim. P. 11(a)(2). He appeals the
denial of his motion to suppress, and we affirm.
I.
In the early morning hours of July 18, 2020, Cedar Rapids Police Department
Officer Kyzer Moore was patrolling a neighborhood in the southwest part of the city.
The neighborhood had been the site of several crimes involving stolen vehicles with
“switched” license plates or disguising paint jobs. Officer Moore was involved in
several of those cases.
While patrolling, Officer Moore noticed Brown’s orange motorcycle because
it was the only vehicle out at that time of day. Brown did not commit any traffic
violations and the motorcycle’s license plate was properly displayed. Officer Moore
ran a license check and learned that the plate was registered to a blue motorcycle.
Officer Moore followed the motorcycle as it turned onto Third Street
Southwest. He saw that the motorcycle was about to pull into the driveway of a
residence on Third Street Southwest. The Third Street residence was familiar to law
enforcement as one where narcotics, stolen property, and stolen vehicles were
frequently found. Officer Moore activated his lights, and Brown came to a stop. A
pat-down search of Brown revealed a firearm, several knives, and brass knuckles.
Brown was indicted on three firearm-related offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 922.
He moved to suppress the firearm, arguing that Officer Moore did not have
reasonable suspicion to make the traffic stop.
At the suppression hearing, Officer Moore testified about some of the reasons
that a license plate may not correspond to the vehicle to which it is affixed. For
example, an owner may replace an expired license plate with an unexpired plate
from a different vehicle. Or an owner may be barred or suspended from registering
a vehicle and use a license plate from another vehicle. Or the vehicle may have been
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stolen, and the driver put a different license plate on it to avoid detection. Officer
Moore also described several innocent explanations too: repainting the vehicle but
not updating the registration information, making a mistake when registering the
vehicle, or putting on the wrong license plate when an owner has several vehicles.
Officer Moore further testified that he was aware of several past vehicle-
related crimes in both the general neighborhood and the immediate vicinity of
Brown’s stop. Many of these incidents involved vehicles with colors that did not
match their registrations or vehicles that otherwise had anomalies with their license
plates. Indeed, Officer Moore was involved in at least three vehicle stops near or
linked to the Third Street residence where Brown was headed. On one of these
occasions, just a month before Brown’s stop, the driver had just left the Third Street
residence when Officer Moore conducted a license check and confirmed that the
vehicle was stolen. On another, Officer Moore stopped a vehicle that lacked a
license plate and discovered that the driver had a suspended license. He also learned
that the driver had been stopped earlier in the evening by another officer near the
Third Street residence. At that earlier stop, the vehicle had a license plate, but the
registration information did not match the vehicle’s color. Finally, on a third
occasion, only a couple blocks away from the Third Street residence, a trailer had a
license plate that did not belong on it. The trailer turned out to be stolen, and the
driver had a suspended license.
The district court found that Officer Moore had reasonable suspicion to stop
Brown and denied Brown’s motion. The court found that Officer Moore had a
particularized and objective basis for the stop based on three factors known to him
at the time. One was the color discrepancy between the vehicle and the registration
information. Another was his knowledge of the surrounding neighborhood’s
multiple incidents of vehicle theft and other vehicular crimes that involved license-
plate discrepancies and noncompliant registrations. The third was his experience
with the specific location—a residence associated with at least three cases involving
stolen vehicles, two of which were different colors than their registrations indicated.
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Brown appeals the denial of his motion to suppress, arguing that Officer
Moore lacked reasonable suspicion for the stop. He contends that changing the color
of a vehicle is “innocent, common behavior” and that Officer Moore did not have a
particularized basis to suspect that Brown had stolen the motorcycle.
II.
We apply a mixed standard of review to a district court’s denial of a motion
to suppress evidence. United States v. Mitchell, 55 F.4th 620, 622 (8th Cir. 2022).
We review factual findings for clear error, while we review de novo the ultimate
conclusion of whether the Fourth Amendment was violated. Id.The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
A traffic stop is a reasonable seizure if it is supported by probable cause or
reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. United States v. Allen, 43 F.4th 901, 907
(8th Cir. 2022). Reasonable suspicion is “a particularized and objective basis for
suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity.” Kansas v. Glover,
589 U.S. ---, 140 S. Ct. 1183, 1187 (2020). “The standard depends on the factual
and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men,
not legal technicians, act.” Id. at 1188 (emphasis and internal quotation marks
omitted). Officers are allowed “to draw on their own experience and specialized
training to make inferences from and deductions about the cumulative information
available to them that might well elude an untrained person.” United States v.
Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273 (2002) (internal quotation marks omitted). In analyzing
whether an officer had reasonable suspicion, we look to the totality of the
circumstances. Glover, 140 S. Ct. at 1191.
We conclude that Officer Moore had reasonable suspicion to make the traffic
stop. He testified that a color discrepancy might indicate that a vehicle is stolen, the
driver has a suspended license, or the registration is expired. These are all valid
reasons to make a traffic stop. See, e.g., United States v. James, 52 F.4th 1035,
1037-38 (8th Cir. 2022) (stolen); Glover, 140 S. Ct. at 1191 (license); United States
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v. McLemore, 887 F.3d 861, 864-65 (8th Cir. 2018) (registration). And his suspicion
was based cumulatively on particularized, objective facts: the color discrepancy
between the vehicle’s paint and its registration information, his knowledge of the
neighborhood where the stop occurred, and his experience with the specific location
of the stop. See Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 124 (2000) (“[T]he fact that the
stop occurred in a ‘high crime area’ [is] among the relevant contextual
considerations in a Terry analysis.”); United States v. Dortch, 868 F.3d 674, 680 (8th
Cir. 2017) (holding that an officer had reasonable suspicion to conduct a pat-down
search based in part on his familiarity with a specific building associated with gang
activity).
Brown argues that a color discrepancy cannot factor into an officer’s
reasonable suspicion. We see no reason why it cannot under appropriate
circumstances. The Seventh Circuit case United States v. Uribe, 709 F.3d 646, 651-
52 (7th Cir. 2013), is instructive. There, the court held that color discrepancy alone
could not support reasonable suspicion of vehicle theft to make a traffic stop absent
any evidence suggesting otherwise. Id. at 652. But that is not the situation here
because color discrepancy was not the sole basis for Officer Moore’s suspicion.
Instead, the discrepancy was a contributing factor along with his particularized
knowledge of and experience with vehicle-related crimes involving license-plate
mismatches near the location of Brown’s stop. Uribe acknowledged such a
distinction: “Where our sister circuits have considered color discrepancies, they
have relied on the discrepancy as only one of several factors establishing reasonable
suspicion.” Id. at 651 & n.4. One of these sister-circuit cases, United States v.
Cooper, 431 F. App’x 399, 402 (6th Cir. 2011), upheld a finding of reasonable
suspicion based on an officer’s testimony about his knowledge and experience with
vehicle-related crime and the fact that the vehicle was spotted in a high-crime area.
Like the officer in Cooper, Officer Moore “described a specific, circumscribed
location” (the Third Street residence) and “noted the frequency of car thefts and other
crimes in that area.” See id. Thus, the district court did not err in concluding that
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Officer Moore had reasonable suspicion based, in part, on the color discrepancy
between the vehicle and its registration.2
Brown counters by pointing to possible innocent explanations for the color
discrepancy. We are not persuaded. The Supreme Court has “consistently
recognized that reasonable suspicion need not rule out the possibility of innocent
conduct.” Navarette v. California, 572 U.S. 393, 403 (2014) (internal quotation
marks omitted). Ultimately, “the relevant inquiry is not whether particular conduct
is ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty,’ but the degree of suspicion that attaches to particular types
of noncriminal acts.” United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 10 (1989). And as we
have already noted, this degree of suspicion may be informed by an officer’s
particular knowledge and experience. See Arvizu, 534 U.S. at 273. Further, the
totality-of-the-circumstances test “precludes th[e] sort of divide-and-conquer
analysis” that Brown attempts in attacking Officer Moore’s partial reliance on the
color discrepancy. See United States v. Collins, 883 F.3d 1029, 1032 (8th Cir. 2018).
Our task is not to analyze the individual fact of a color discrepancy “in isolation” but
rather in the totality of the circumstances. See id. In all, Officer Moore’s extensive
testimony about his personal knowledge and experience with license-plate
anomalies and vehicular crimes both at the specific location of the stop and in the
surrounding neighborhood satisfy us that he had reasonable suspicion to stop Brown.
2
Brown points to United States v. Rodgers from the Ninth Circuit, which
expressed doubt about whether color discrepancy and presence in a high-crime
location can give rise to reasonable suspicion. See 656 F.3d 1023, 1027 (9th Cir.
2011) (“[The two factors] at best provide a thin basis for reasonable suspicion that
the car was stolen.”). But Rodgers is distinguishable because it did not involve an
officer’s experience with a specific, circumscribed location like the Third Street
residence here or the location in Cooper. At any rate, “[i]n the context of a
commonsense, nontechnical standard like reasonable suspicion, which must be
evaluated in light of the whole mass of facts and circumstances present in a given
situation, it is natural for cases that resemble each other in certain ways or at a high
level of generality to come out differently as a result of key details that weigh
differently in one than in the other.” Dortch, 868 F.3d at 681.
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III.
For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the district court’s denial of Brown’s
motion to suppress.
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