United States v. Ryan

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 11-2341
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Appellee,
v.
KEVIN RYAN,
Defendant, Appellant.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Patti B. Saris, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Howard, Ripple* and Thompson,
Circuit Judges.
Gary G. Pelletier, with whom Pelletier Clarke & Caley, LLC was
on brief, for appellant.
Mark T. Quinlivan, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom
Carmen M. Ortiz, United States Attorney, was on brief, for
appellee.
September 30, 2013
*
Of the Seventh Circuit, sitting by designation.
HOWARD, Circuit Judge. A federal law enforcement officer
makes a lawful traffic stop and sees that the driver of the stopped
car is intoxicated. He arrests the driver, even though the officer
is outside of the jurisdiction in which he is authorized to make
arrests. At the driver's trial, does the Fourth Amendment's
prohibition against "unreasonable searches and seizures" require
the court to exclude evidence obtained after the arrest? We hold,
in the circumstances of this case, that it does not.
I. Background
On the night of August 31, 2007, appellant Kevin Ryan was
driving within the Charlestown Navy Yard, which is part of the
Boston National Historic Park (the "Park"), a federal enclave. From
his marked cruiser, United States Park Ranger David LaMere saw Ryan
driving over the center line of the road. LaMere followed Ryan,
turned on his cruiser lights, and stopped Ryan to issue a citation.
By the time LaMere turned on his lights, however, he and Ryan had
left the Charlestown Navy Yard and were no longer on federal land.
LaMere noticed that Ryan smelled strongly of alcohol, was slurring
his speech, and had difficulty retrieving his vehicle registration.
LaMere asked Ryan if he had been drinking, and Ryan admitted that
he had consumed four or five beers. Ryan voluntarily took four
field sobriety tests, which "showed several indications that he was
impaired," according to LaMere. Believing that Ryan was
intoxicated and could not safely operate his vehicle, LaMere
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arrested Ryan and took him to the Park's prisoner processing area.1
There, Ryan refused to submit to a test to determine the
concentration of alcohol in his breath.
The government charged Ryan with three federal
violations: operating a motor vehicle under the influence, 36
C.F.R. § 4.23(a)(1); unsafe operation of a motor vehicle, id.§ 4.22(b)(1); and refusal to submit to a breath alcohol test, id.
§ 4.23(c)(2). Ryan moved to suppress evidence arising from his
arrest on the grounds that LaMere had no statutory authority to
arrest him outside the Park. While there is no geographical limit
on the ability of United States Park Rangers to "conduct
investigations of offenses against the United States committed in
[the National Park] system," 16 U.S.C. § 1a-6(b)(3), they may make
warrantless arrests only "within that system," id. § 1a-6(b)(1).2
The magistrate judge presiding over the case agreed that LaMere
lacked statutory authority to arrest Ryan, but she refused to
suppress the evidence because the arrest was not an unreasonable
seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Following a
trial, the magistrate judge found Ryan guilty of unsafe operation
1
The government argued before the district court that
LaMere's actions did not constitute an arrest, but the court
disagreed. The government no longer disputes this issue.
2
There is an exception to this rule when "the person to be
arrested is fleeing [from the National Park system] to avoid
arrest," 16 U.S.C. § 1a-6(b)(1), but the government does not argue
that Ryan was fleeing from LaMere.
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and refusal to submit to a breath alcohol test, and not guilty of
operating under the influence. Ryan appealed his conviction to a
district judge, who affirmed the magistrate judge's decision not to
suppress the evidence gathered after the arrest. Ryan timely
appealed to our court.
II. Analysis
When reviewing the denial of a motion to suppress, we
review the district court's factual findings for clear error and
its legal conclusions de novo. United States v. Kearney, 672 F.3d
81, 88-89 (1st Cir. 2012). Here, there are no disputed factual
findings and only one disputed legal conclusion: that the Fourth
Amendment does not require exclusion of evidence gathered after an
arrest made outside of a federal law enforcement officer's
statutory jurisdiction. Ryan does not claim that anything about
his arrest was unconstitutional other than LaMere's lack of
authority.
The Supreme Court has not spoken to this precise issue,
but it did hold in Virginia v. Moore, 553 U.S. 164 (2008), that the
Fourth Amendment does not require the exclusion of evidence
obtained in a search incident to an arrest that violates state law.
In Moore, two police officers in the city of Portsmouth, Virginia
arrested the defendant for driving on a suspended license. Id.
at 166-67. When conducting a search incident to that arrest, they
discovered crack cocaine and cash, which led to state-law charges
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against the defendant for possession of cocaine with intent to
distribute. Id. at 167. Because driving on a suspended license is
not an arrestable offense under Virginia law, the defendant moved
to suppress the evidence obtained in the search. Id. The trial
court denied the motion, and the defendant was convicted after a
bench trial. Id. at 168. On appeal, the Supreme Court held that
the Fourth Amendment did not prohibit the defendant's arrest or
require the exclusion of evidence. Id. at 176, 178.
The Court's decision in Moore relied on both the history
and policy underlying the Fourth Amendment's protection against
"unreasonable searches and seizures."
The immediate object of the Fourth Amendment
was to prohibit the general warrants and writs
of assistance that English judges had employed
against the colonists. That suggests, if
anything, that founding-era citizens were
skeptical of using the rules for search and
seizure set by government actors as the index
of reasonableness. . . . No early case or
commentary, to our knowledge, suggested the
Amendment was intended to incorporate
subsequently enacted statutes. None of the
early Fourth Amendment cases that scholars
have identified sought to base a
constitutional claim on a violation of a state
or federal statute concerning arrest.
Id. at 168-69 (citations omitted). Finding no indication in the
history of the Fourth Amendment that an arrest in violation of a
statute would be an unreasonable seizure, the Court analyzed the
arrest "in light of traditional standards of reasonableness 'by
assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an
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individual's privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is
needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.'"
Id. at 171 (quoting Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U.S. 295, 300 (1999)).
On this point, the Court held that "when an officer has probable
cause to believe a person committed even a minor crime in his
presence, the balancing of private and public interests is not in
doubt. The arrest is constitutionally reasonable." Id. Whether
a state law limits the officer's power to arrest is irrelevant, the
Court held, because "when States go above the Fourth Amendment
minimum, the Constitution's protections concerning search and
seizure remain the same." Id. at 173.
Moore would readily dispose of Ryan's arguments for
suppressing the evidence against him, but for two distinctions
between that case and this one. First, Moore involved a seizure in
violation of state law, not federal law. Second, the law at issue
in Moore limited an officer's power to arrest based on the type of
offense committed, while the law at issue here limits the territory
in which LaMere had the power to arrest. Neither distinction
provides a reason to suppress the evidence against Ryan.
Moore itself suggests that neither federal nor state
statutes affect whether a seizure is unreasonable under the Fourth
Amendment: "None of the early Fourth Amendment cases that scholars
have identified sought to base a constitutional claim on a
violation of a state or federal statute concerning arrest." Id.
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at 169 (emphasis added). Although much of the discussion in Moore
focused on issues specific to state law, the Court repeatedly
stated that an arrest supported by probable cause is
constitutionally reasonable, id. at 171, 173, 175, 177-78, without
implying an exception for an arrest in violation of a federal
statute.3
We ourselves have "not resolved whether an arresting
officer's lack of authority under . . . federal law to conduct an
otherwise constitutionally valid arrest constitutes an unreasonable
seizure under the Fourth Amendment." Santoni v. Potter, 369 F.3d
594, 598 (1st Cir. 2004). Nevertheless, our precedent, like Moore,
suggests that such an arrest does not warrant the exclusion of
evidence. In United States v. Hensel, 699 F.2d 18 (1st Cir. 1983),
officers of the United States Coast Guard, along with Canadian law
enforcement officers, searched a vessel off the coast of Canada and
discovered several tons of marijuana. The defendant argued that
evidence gathered during the search should have been suppressed
because the Coast Guard officers exceeded their statutory authority
3
The Supreme Court has suppressed evidence for violations of
federal statutes in a "few cases," but only when "the excluded
evidence arose directly out of statutory violations that implicated
important Fourth and Fifth Amendment interests." Sanchez-Llamas v.
Oregon, 548 U.S. 331, 348 (2006). Ryan has not identified an
important Fourth or Fifth Amendment interest implicated by his
arrest. In addition, some federal statutes explicitly prohibit the
use of evidence obtained in violation of those statutes. E.g., 18
U.S.C. § 2518(10)(a)(i) (permitting a motion to suppress the
contents of an unlawfully intercepted communication). The statute
at issue in this case contains no such prohibition.
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to conduct searches. Id. at 26. We assumed without deciding that
the officers exceeded their authority, but we stated that "[t]he
exclusionary rule was not fashioned to vindicate a broad, general
right to be free of agency action not 'authorized' by law, but
rather to protect certain specific, constitutionally protected
rights of individuals." Id. at 29. As the Supreme Court would
later do in Moore, we emphasized that "the search did not invade
[the defendant's] Fourth Amendment privacy interests, for the
search was supported by 'probable cause.'" Id. at 30. Therefore,
we "reject[ed] the argument that the Coast Guard's violation of the
statute . . . in [that] case require[d] us to apply the
exclusionary rule." Id. The same is true here: Because Ryan's
arrest was supported by probable cause, it did not violate his
Fourth Amendment privacy interests, and the district court was not
required to exclude the evidence obtained following the arrest.
As to the territorial limit on LaMere's jurisdiction,
Moore again implies that an extraterritorial arrest is not a per se
violation of the Fourth Amendment. In Moore, the Supreme Court
stated without qualification that an arrest supported by probable
cause is constitutionally reasonable. To be sure, the Court has
clarified that a balancing of interests is appropriate for
"searches or seizures conducted in an extraordinary manner,
unusually harmful to an individual's privacy or even physical
interests--such as, for example, seizure by means of deadly force,
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unannounced entry into a home, entry into a home without a warrant,
or physical penetration of the body." Whren v. United States, 517
U.S. 806, 818 (1996) (citations omitted). But in Whren, the Court
held that a traffic stop by plainclothes officers "does not
remotely qualify as such an extreme practice." Id. Likewise, for
an officer to arrest an obviously intoxicated driver just outside
that officer's territorial jurisdiction, after a lawful traffic
stop, is "not remotely" akin to the invasions of privacy that might
call for the exclusion of evidence.4
The weight of authority from other courts of appeals
supports our conclusion. Although we observed in Santoni that the
courts are divided on "whether an arresting officer's lack of
authority under state or federal law to conduct an otherwise
constitutionally valid arrest constitutes an unreasonable seizure
under the Fourth Amendment," 369 F.3d at 598, subsequent decisions
have rejected the proposition that this lack of authority makes an
arrest per se unreasonable. The Tenth Circuit's decision in Ross
v. Neff, 905 F.2d 1349 (10th Cir. 1990), which we cited in Santoni,
has since been limited to cases involving warrantless arrests by
state police on federal tribal land. United States v. Jones, 701
F.3d 1300, 1312 (10th Cir. 2012) (holding that an arrest in Kansas
4
Because Ryan was arrested after a lawful traffic stop, we
need not consider whether suppression would be appropriate if
LaMere were acting in circumstances wholly divorced from his
authority (for example, by arresting someone while on vacation in
another state).
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by Missouri police officers did not violate the Fourth Amendment).
And the Second Circuit's decision in Malone v. County of Suffolk,
968 F.2d 1480 (2d Cir. 1992), which we also cited in Santoni, must
be read in light of United States v. Wilson, 699 F.3d 235 (2d Cir.
2012), in which that court found no violation of the Fourth
Amendment when an extraterritorial arrest violated New York law and
federal policy. Other courts of appeals have agreed that an
extraterritorial arrest may comply with the Fourth Amendment.
United States v. Sed, 601 F.3d 224 (3d Cir. 2010); United States v.
Goings, 573 F.3d 1141 (11th Cir. 2009); Engleman v. Deputy Murray,
546 F.3d 944 (8th Cir. 2008); Pasiewicz v. Lake Cnty. Forest
Preserve Dist., 270 F.3d 520 (7th Cir. 2001).5
In short, Ryan's arrest does not constitute the kind of
invasion of privacy that the Fourth Amendment prohibits. The
district court correctly refused to exclude the evidence that
LaMere obtained after that arrest.
III. Conclusion
The judgment of the district court is affirmed.
5
In Pasiewicz, the court stated that the result might have
been different if the arresting officers had known that they lacked
jurisdiction and made an arrest in violation of a specific
prohibition by the police department in whose jurisdiction they
acted. 270 F.3d at 527.
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