United States v. Derrick Phillips , 914 F.3d 557 ( 2019 )


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  •                                In the
    United States Court of Appeals
    For the Seventh Circuit
    ____________________
    No. 18-1372
    UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
    Plaintiff-Appellee,
    v.
    DERRICK PHILLIPS,
    Defendant-Appellant.
    ____________________
    Appeal from the United States District Court for the
    Central District of Illinois.
    No. 03-CR-30019—Sue E. Myerscough, Judge.
    ____________________
    ARGUED NOVEMBER 6, 2018 — DECIDED JANUARY 28, 2019
    ____________________
    Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and KANNE,
    Circuit Judges.
    WOOD, Chief Judge. In this appeal, Derrick Phillips is chal-
    lenging the district court’s decision to revoke his supervised
    release. He argues that the drug evidence used against him
    was the fruit of an unconstitutional search and should have
    been excluded. Guided by the Supreme Court’s opinion in
    Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole v. Scott, 
    524 U.S. 357
    (1998), which held that the exclusionary rule does not apply
    2                                                     No. 18-1372
    to state parole-revocation hearings, the district court ruled
    that the exclusionary rule was similarly inappropriate for su-
    pervised-release-revocation hearings. The court then re-
    viewed the evidence presented by the government and con-
    cluded that Phillips’s supervised release should be revoked
    and that he should be sentenced to 36 months’ imprisonment.
    Before this court, Phillips contests only the district court’s rul-
    ing on the exclusionary rule issue. We affirm.
    In 2010 Phillips began serving an eight-year term of super-
    vised release stemming from a 2003 conviction for possession
    of cocaine base with intent to distribute. Phillips completed
    seven years of his term largely without incident. But on Octo-
    ber 4, 2017, police officers in Quincy, Illinois, stopped him as
    he drove his car out of the parking lot of the town’s Amtrak
    station. After a dog alerted the officers that drugs might be
    present in the car, they conducted a search, discovered a pack-
    age containing approximately 196 grams of heroin, and ar-
    rested Phillips for possession with intent to distribute. The
    next month, Phillips’s probation officer filed a petition to re-
    voke his supervised release based on his violation of the con-
    dition that he not commit any crimes while on release.
    In the district court, Phillips moved to suppress the evi-
    dence seized from his car. He alleged that the putative traffic
    violation that served as the basis of the stop was not, in fact, a
    violation of any traffic law at all. Accordingly, he argued, the
    police lacked probable cause for the stop and the resulting ev-
    idence should be suppressed. The district court did not reach
    the merits of this argument because it concluded that the rea-
    soning in Scott left no room for the application of the exclu-
    sionary rule to supervised-release-revocation hearings. We
    agree with that ruling.
    No. 18-1372                                                    3
    As the district court noted, two of the Supreme Court’s ra-
    tionales for declining to extend the exclusionary rule to the
    parole context “equally appl[y] to hearings for the revocation
    of supervised release.” First, the Court expressed concern in
    Scott that the exclusionary rule would “alter the traditionally
    flexible, administrative nature of parole revocation proceed-
    
    ings.” 524 U.S. at 364
    . Phillips contends that certain features
    of hearings for the revocation of supervised release make
    them more adversarial and trial-like than is true for parole
    hearings. These include the statutory right to counsel that de-
    fendants enjoy pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Proce-
    dure 32.1 and the requirement that defendants make specific
    objections in order to preserve them for appellate review, see
    United States v. Raney, 
    797 F.3d 454
    , 462 (7th Cir. 2015).
    We can assume that Phillips is correct to observe that the
    Supreme Court’s description of parole revocation hearings as
    “nonadversarial,” 
    Scott, 524 U.S. at 366
    , is an imperfect fit for
    supervised-release-revocation hearings (and for that matter,
    parole hearings). But the Court was well aware that the pa-
    role-revocation procedures are a part of the overall criminal
    justice process. And there is no escaping the fact that a hear-
    ing to determine whether supervised release should be re-
    voked is substantially closer in form and substance to a hear-
    ing focusing on parole revocation than it is to a criminal trial.
    The Court emphasized in Scott that it has “repeatedly de-
    clined to extend the exclusionary rule to proceedings other
    than criminal 
    trials.” 524 U.S. at 363
    . In other non-criminal-
    trial procedural contexts that have adversarial qualities and
    carry significant risks for defendants, the Court has found
    that the exclusionary rule is not worth the “substantial social
    costs” that would accompany it. 
    Id., quoting United
    States v.
    Leon, 
    468 U.S. 897
    , 907 (1984). See I.N.S. v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468
    4                                                    No. 18-1372
    U.S. 1032 (1984) (holding the exclusionary rule inapplicable to
    deportation proceedings); United States v. Janis, 
    428 U.S. 433
    (1976) (holding the exclusionary rule inapplicable to civil tax
    proceedings). Unless and until the Supreme Court reconsid-
    ers this line of cases, we are not free to extend the exclusionary
    rule to hearings for the revocation of supervised release.
    Second, the Scott Court expressed skepticism about the
    likelihood that the exclusionary rule would provide any
    added deterrence of unlawful police behavior if it were to be
    available in parole-revocation hearings, “because application
    of the rule in the criminal trial already provides significant
    deterrence of unconstitutional searches.” 
    Scott, 524 U.S. at 364
    .
    Phillips suggests that this is not so in the supervised release
    context, given that the government has (and often uses) the
    option to pursue revocation in lieu of a new prosecution. Thus,
    he argues, the underlying police conduct may go unchal-
    lenged in any forum. But the same option exists for parole-
    revocation hearings. Statistics indicate that there are more
    than 750,000 people on state parole, and another 137,000 on
    federal supervised release. See Probation and Parole in the
    United States, 2016, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
    https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ppus16.pdf (2016 state
    parole population of 760,392); Post-Conviction Supervision – Ju-
    dicial    Business     2017,     United       States    Courts,
    http://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/post-conviction-
    supervision-judicial-business-2016 (2016 federal supervisee
    population of 137,410). In both instances, when the reason for
    revocation is the commission of a new crime, the prosecuting
    authority has the option to revoke a defendant’s parole or su-
    pervised release rather than pursue a new case. If the Su-
    preme Court found the added deterrence benefits insufficient
    to justify the exclusionary rule in a parole hearing, logic
    No. 18-1372                                                     5
    compels the conclusion that the same result must apply for
    supervised release.
    That is enough to dispose of Phillips’s appeal. We add,
    however, that his position would require us seriously to un-
    dermine our own circuit precedent and to break from the uni-
    form consensus of our sister circuits. We have long held that
    the exclusionary rule does not apply at sentencing. United
    States v. Brimah, 
    214 F.3d 854
    (7th Cir. 2000). And the Supreme
    Court has held that in the context of supervised release,
    “postrevocation penalties relate to the original offense,” Johnson
    v. United States, 
    529 U.S. 694
    , 701 (2000) (emphasis added). See
    also United States v. Boultinghouse, 
    784 F.3d 1163
    , 1171 (7th Cir.
    2015) (noting that “a revocation proceeding … focuses on the
    modification of a sentence already imposed and implicates
    the conditional (rather than absolute) liberty that the defend-
    ant enjoys as a result of that sentence”). It is difficult to see
    how we could continue to find the exclusionary rule inappro-
    priate at the imposition of the initial sentence and yet to apply
    the rule in downstream hearings aimed at modifying that sen-
    tence.
    Phillips argues that as a practical reality, when judges de-
    cide whether to revoke supervised release and (if so) how
    much prison time to impose, they are more focused on the
    new offense than on the underlying crime of conviction. But
    they are entitled to take the entire record into account at the
    time of revocation, not simply the facts as they existed at the
    time of the original sentence. That appears to be what hap-
    pened for Phillips when the judge mentioned the ongoing
    “heroin epidemic” as a justification for her sentence. And the
    fact remains that as a legal matter, the Supreme Court has
    made crystal clear that revocation relates back to, and is a
    6                                                    No. 18-1372
    function of, the sentence for the original offense. Ruling for
    Phillips would therefore call Brimah into question. As Phillips
    acknowledges, his position would also put us in direct con-
    flict with every other court of appeals to consider the ques-
    tion. See United States v. Hebert, 
    201 F.3d 1103
    , 1104 (9th Cir.
    2000) (holding exclusionary rule inapplicable to supervised
    release); United States v. Armstrong, 
    187 F.3d 392
    , 394 (4th Cir.
    1999) (same); see also United States v. Charles, 
    531 F.3d 637
    , 640
    (8th Cir. 2008) (holding the exclusionary rule inapplicable to
    supervised release in the absence of a showing of police har-
    assment); United States v. Montez, 
    952 F.2d 854
    , 857 (5th Cir.
    1992) (same). We decline to create such a split, nor need we
    address the exceptions contemplated by the Fifth and Eighth
    Circuits, as there has been no showing of harassment in this
    case.
    Phillips suggested at oral argument that the main purpose
    of this appeal was to preserve this issue for Supreme Court
    review. That he has done. But until the Supreme Court ad-
    dresses the point, his arguments in this court are foreclosed.
    The judgment of the district court is
    AFFIRMED.