United States v. Taurus Cooper, 24 F.4th 1086

Police executed a warrant targeting Taurus Cooper; Shelby County Fugitive Apprehension Team joined and knew Cooper was a gang member shown holding a Glock in a Facebook photo.
Officers went to Cooper’s girlfriend Angel Walton’s home; Officer Fox used a ruse at the door, entered, and arrested Cooper while other officers performed a protective sweep of the house.
During the sweep (which the district court later found unconstitutional), Officer Jensen found the Glock under a mattress; only after that discovery officers presented Walton with Miranda/consent forms, and she signed consent to a search.
Cooper moved to suppress the gun as the fruit of the unlawful sweep; the district court found the sweep unlawful but denied suppression, concluding Walton’s consent was voluntary/attenuated and that the gun inevitably would have been found in the consent search.
Cooper pleaded guilty while reserving appeal of the suppression ruling and was sentenced; on appeal the Sixth Circuit vacated and remanded because the district court applied the wrong legal test.

Issue	Plaintiff's Argument	Defendant's Argument	Held
Whether the gun seized during an unlawful protective sweep is admissible under the inevitable discovery doctrine	Suppress the gun as the primary fruit of an unconstitutional sweep	Gun admissible because, even absent the sweep, officers would have obtained Walton’s consent and found the gun	District court used attenuation test improperly; remanded for correct inevitable-discovery analysis focused on pre-sweep facts
Whether Walton’s post-sweep consent purged the taint (attenuation)	Consent was tainted by the illegal sweep and thus cannot validate the previously seized gun	Consent was voluntary and sufficiently attenuated from the sweep	Attenuation is the wrong doctrine to justify admission of a primary product of an illegal search; district court’s attenuation finding does not resolve inevitable-discovery question
Burden and proper inquiry for inevitable discovery	N/A (Cooper contests admissibility)	Government must prove, by historical facts, that evidence would have been lawfully discovered absent the illegality	Government bears the burden; court must assess what would have happened "at the instant before the unlawful search," minimizing speculation and focusing on verifiable facts (e.g., would officers have sought consent, would Walton have consented, would the search have found the gun)

Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 (1984) (formulates the inevitable discovery doctrine and permissive admission when evidence would have been discovered lawfully)
Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533 (1988) (distinguishes derivative evidence and explains exclusionary-rule objectives)
Utah v. Strieff, 579 U.S. 232 (2016) (compares attenuation and inevitable discovery as causal doctrines)
Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590 (1975) (sets attenuation/Wong Sun factors for purging primary taint of unlawful police conduct)
Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (1963) (establishes principles on derivative evidence and attenuation)
United States v. Kennedy, 61 F.3d 494 (6th Cir. 1995) (inevitable discovery where routine airline policy would have opened lost luggage)
United States v. Keszthelyi, 308 F.3d 557 (6th Cir. 2002) (inevitable discovery where officers would have obtained and executed a warrant based on preexisting probable cause)
United States v. Calhoun, 49 F.3d 231 (6th Cir. 1995) (illustrates an attenuation analysis where consent followed an unlawful sweep that produced no evidence)
United States v. Kimes, 246 F.3d 800 (6th Cir. 2001) (inevitable discovery where standard inventory searches would have revealed evidence)
United States v. Elmore, 18 F.4th 193 (6th Cir.) (discusses but-for causation and limits of suppression doctrines)