UNITED STATES оf America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Antonio ESQUIVEL-RIOS, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 14-3162.
United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.
May 27, 2015.
1299
III. CONCLUSION
We have jurisdiction under
James A. Brown, Assistant United States Attorney (and Barry R. Grissom, United States Attorney, with him on the brief), Topeka, KS, for Plaintiff-Appellee.
Befоre BRISCOE, Chief Circuit Judge, SEYMOUR, and KELLY, Circuit Judges.
KELLY, Circuit Judge.
Defendant-Appellant Antonio Esquivel-Rios appeals from the district court‘s order denying his motion to suppress evidence. In Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s first direct appeal, we concluded that the record lacked the quantity and quality of information necessary for us to determine whether Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. United States v. Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d 1231, 1236-39 (10th Cir.2013). We remanded to allow the district court to reconsider its Fourth Amendment ruling in light of our discussion. With the benefit of additional evidence and briefing, the district court concluded that Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s Fourth Amendment rights had indeed been violated but that suppression was not appropriate given the lack of police culpability. United States v. Esquivel-Rios, 39 F.Supp.3d 1175 (D.Kan.2014). Accordingly, the district court denied Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s motion to suppress for a second time. Exercising jurisdiction pursuant to
Background
We presented the facts giving rise to this criminal prosecution in the prior appeal:
Our case began when Kansas Trooper Andrew Dean, a regular before this court, sat watching traffic along I-70. At some point, a minivan caught his eye. There was nothing special about the minivan except maybe the fact it bore a Colorado temporary 30-day registration tag. But even that didn‘t suggest anything amiss: the tag looked genuine enough, it was displayed in the right place, its expiration date hadn‘t yet passed. All the same, Trooper Dean decided to verify the tag with a law enforcement database. He called in the tag number to a dispatcher who soon replied “that‘s a negatory on record, not returning.” Because of—and only be-cause of—the dispatcher‘s “no return” report, Trooper Dean turned on his
lights and stopped the minivan. After a brief discussion, the trooper sought and received permission to conduct a search, one that eventually yielded a secret compartment containing over a pound of methamphetamine.
Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at 1234-35.
During the initial proceedings before the district court, Mr. Esquivel-Rios sought to suppress all evidence obtained as a result of thе vehicle search. He argued that the traffic stop violated his Fourth Amendment rights because the trooper lacked reasonable suspicion of any criminal wrongdoing. Because the trooper stopped him solely because of the database‘s “no return” report, Mr. Esquivel-Rios argued, he lacked particularized and objective information to establish reasonable suspicion.
The district court disagreed, however, and denied Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s motion to suppress. It concluded that the dispatcher‘s report, which indicated that no information could be obtained regarding the vehicle‘s registration, gave the trooper reason to suspect criminal activity. Later, Mr. Esquivel-Rios was found guilty of possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute,
Much of this court‘s first opinion was devoted to a single issue raised by Mr. Esquivel-Rios on appeal: the interplay between database reliability and the existence of reasonable suspicion. We began by noting that the district court‘s reasonable suspicion determination was supported, at least superficially, by our Fourth Amendment cases. “This court and others have regularly upheld traffic stops based on information that the defendant‘s vehicle‘s registration failed to apрear in a law enforcement database....” Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at 1235 (citing United States v. Cortez-Galaviz, 495 F.3d 1203, 1205-06 (10th Cir.2007); United States v. Garcia-Ballesteros, 74 F.3d 1250, 1996 WL 3920, at *1 (10th Cir.1996) (unpublished table decision)). The logic of those traffic stop cases is quite simple. Most, if not all, states have laws requiring motor vehicle owners and operators to register their vehicles with a state agency before operating those vehicles on public roads. The state agency then maintains the registration information in a database, which is often accessible to law enforcement. Thus, “[w]hen a law enforcement database yields no information about a registration tag, ... that raises a non-trivial possibility the tag wasn‘t lawfully issued in the first place but falsified in some way.” Id. That non-trivial possibility, wе have held, can amount to reasonable suspicion.
We also concluded in the first appeal that those cases were not dispositive of Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s Fourth Amendment challenge. The presence of an additional, complicating fact that we had not before contemplated made Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s case worthy of deeper consideration. See id. (“This court and others have regularly upheld traffic stops based on information that the defendant‘s vehicle‘s registration failed to appear in a law enforcement database—at least when the record suggested no reason to worry about the database‘s reliability.“) (emphasis added). Here, there was evidence “suggesting that the database on which the officer relied to justify his stop might bear a real problem—a problem that might mean a ‘no return’ doesn‘t suggest criminal conduct but only some bureaucratic snafu.” Id. After dispatcher Derek Lathan informed the trooper that the temporary tag at issue was “negatory on the record, not re-turning,” the trooper acknowledged the re-
We had previously left open the possibility that a demonstration of database unreliability “might well form a persuasive basis for a suppression motion,” Cortez-Galaviz, 495 F.3d at 1209, and thus found significant that the record here might support such a demonstration. We concluded that the district court‘s decision to deny Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s motion for suppression was problematic in light of this evidence, primarily for two reasons.
Our primary concern was that the record did not provide much information about the database on which the trooper relied. Instead, we knew only that the “no return” report served as the sole justification for the traffic stop. Without more information bearing on the database‘s reliability, we said it would be difficult (if not impossible) to determine whether this single report could constitute particularized evidence of criminal activity. Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at 1236. Most important, we emphasized how the reliability question informs the overall reasonable suspicion analysis. Using a hypothetical example to demonstrate this point, we imagined a circumstance where a “no return” report was more likely to indicate innocuous behavior than criminal activity—for example, where “officials systematically decline to place information about Colorado temporary tags into the database because of their fleeting 30-day life span.” Id. Under those circumstances, we expressed doubt that a “no return” report, without more, could support a finding of reasonable suspicion. We stated:
So if legitimate Colorado temporary tags are almost never placed in the database and if forged temporary tags account for an even smaller percentage of the population of temporary tags—both plausible possibilities—getting a “no return” result may tell a reasonable officer next to nothing: virtually every query would yield the same “no return” message whether the tag is legitimate or not. And it is hard to imаgine how a “no return” report in those circumstances could form a “particularized” basis to suspect wrongdoing. What goes into the database will much affect the reasonableness of a search relying on it: garbage in, garbage out.
We further expressed concern that the district court “failed to engage with evidence seeming to call the database into question.” Id. at 1238. In our view, the district court erred by “treat[ing] this case as just another one where the database wasn‘t challenged.” Id. at 1237. We noted that the district court‘s orders denying Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s motions to suppress and for a new trial seemingly overlooked the significance of Lathan‘s comment thаt Colorado temporary tags “usually don‘t return.” In addition, we noted that the district court‘s conclusion rested, at least in part, on misconstrued aspects of the trooper‘s testimony. Id. at 1238.
There were simply too many unanswered questions and too many record ambiguities concerning the database reliability issue for the district court to conclude that no Fourth Amendment violation had occurred. We therefore remanded for further proceedings. In the interests of judicial economy, we recommended that the district court consider not only the Fourth Amendment question but also the question of remedy. Id. at 1239.
At the time Mr. Esquivel-Rios was pulled over in 2010, Colorado temporary tag information was not available in the Colorado Crime Information Center (CCIC), the database designated to interface with state and federal law enforcement agencies. At that time, all Colorado temporary tag information was maintained by the Department of Revenue. The CCIC database, however, was not maintained by either CDOR or CDMV; rather, it was maintained by CBI, and CBI did not receive temporary tag information from CDOR in 2010. 3 R. 539-40, 559. Thus, due to this lack of information-sharing, a CCIC query for Colorado temporary tag information in 2010 would have been futile. Id. at 540, 564. The only way to obtain this information, witnesses testified, was by placing a phone call or sending an administrative message to CDOR. Id. at 540, 561. It was only in 2012, long after Mr. Esquivel-Rios had been arrested and charged, did this practice change. By the spring or early summer of 2012, the CCIC database was loaded with temporary tag information provided by CDOR, id. at 559; see id. at 540; even then, the temporary tag information loaded into the database pertained only to tags issued in December 2011 or later. 4 R. 7-8.
The testimony at the evidentiary hearing established that a CCIC query for a vehicle‘s registration information can yield one of three results: (1) the requested information is produced; (2) no record / not on file; or (3) an error report resulting from “invalid information.” Id. at 545. A database query in 2010 for a Colorado temporary tag would have yielded the second possibility, “not on file,” which indicated that the relevant information “has not been put into the system yet, or ... there is no record available for that tag.” Id. at 546. “No return,” which was Lathan‘s report to the trooper, is not one of the possible results. Id. at 547, 566. Notably, the database provides no warning or notification to end-users that it does not contain the requested information—it simply provides a “not on file” response. Id. at 540-41, 552.
After the trooper radioed in his request to dispatch, Lathan queried his computer system for the vehicle‘s registration and VIN. His system reported, as to both the registration and the VIN, that the information was “not on file” based on a “re-sponse from DMV.” 4 R. 52-53. With these results, Lathan reported back to the trooper that the information was “negatоry on the record, not returning.” Although Lathan reported to the trooper that the information was not returning, both Lathan and the trooper testified that “not on file” and “not returning” were functional equivalents—neither would allow an officer to verify a vehicle‘s registration status. 3 R. 573, 597-98, 601.
Lathan and the trooper testified that they had never been specifically advised, through training or otherwise, that Colorado‘s database lacked registration information for temporary tags. Id. at 570, 584, 601, 608. In general, this is something law enforcement personnel would have learned only through experience. Id. at 561-62.
Accоrding to the trooper‘s testimony, it is part of his agency‘s mission to deter-mine whether vehicles traveling on Kansas roads were validly registered, which, in turn, requires him to investigate potential automobile thefts and forged or altered registrations. Id. at 599-601. He testified that Lathan‘s report raised his suspicions in light of his investigatory experience, and that he believed he could only determine whether the vehicle was validly registered by conducting a traffic stop. Id. at 599. This was something the trooper had done on numerous prior occasions. Id. at 602-03.
Because the CCIC database did not contain any Colorado temporary tag information in 2010, the database‘s report told “a reasonable officer next to nothing” about the legality of the vehicle‘s operation. Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at 1237. Thus, hewing closely to this court‘s guidance from the first direct appeal, the district court found that it had “no choice but to conclude that the ‘negatory on record, not returning’ report ... did not qualify as particularized evidence that the vehicle was not properly registered.” Esquivel-Rios, 39 F.Supp.3d at 1185. The district court therefore found that the trooper‘s traffic stop violated the Fourth Amendment. Despite the constitutional violation, however, the district court found that no basis existed to apply the exclusionary rule. In the court‘s view, “the evidence show[ed] that Troopеr Dean reasonably, but mistakenly believed that the report from dispatch indicated that criminal activity might be afoot, and that he had reasonable suspicion to stop Defendant‘s vehicle.” Id. at 1188. Additionally, the court found no evidence to support Mr. Esquivel-Rios‘s argument that CBI‘s maintenance of the CCIC database amounted to “systemic negligence,” warranting exclusion. Finding no police culpability or systemic negligence to deter, the district court concluded that “the benefits of deterrence in this case do not outweigh its heavy cost.” Id. at 1189.
Discussion
On appeal, the government has abandoned any argument that the “no re-turn” report constituted particularized and objective evidence sufficient to sup-port a finding of reasonable suspicion. Instead, the government contends that the trooper‘s reasonable but mistaken beliefs were constitutionally sufficient to furnish grounds for an investigatory detention.1 Aplee. Br. 22-23, 31. In the al-
A. The Exclusionary Rule and the Good Faith Exception
The exclusionary rule bars the prosecution from using, in its case-in-chief, evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135, 139 (2009). Whether the rule applies in any given case, however, is con-text-dependent. In other words, “suppression is not an automatic consequence of a Fourth Amendment violation.” Id. at 137; Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586, 591 (2006).
Our analysis is guided by several well-established principles. First, the primary object of the exclusionary rule is deterring future Fourth Amendment violations. Evans, 514 U.S. at 10; United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 908-10 (1984). The Court has statеd that sup-pression is justified only if it will result in “appreciable deterrence.” United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. 433, 454 (1976).
Second, “if exclusion of evidence is to have any deterrent effect ... it must alter the behavior of individual law enforcement officers or the policies of their departments.” Leon, 468 U.S. at 918. Thus, determining whether exclusion will further the deterrence rationale requires an assessment of the police misconduct. Id. at 911; see also Evans, 514 U.S. at 14-16. Traditionally, exclusion was reserved for willful violations of Fourth Amendment rights. Leon, 468 U.S. at 919 (“If the purpose of the exclusionary rule is to deter unlawful po-lice conduct, then evidence ... should be suppressed only if it can be said that the law enforcement officer had knowledge, or may properly be charged with knowledge, that the search was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.“) (quoting United States v. Peltier, 422 U.S. 531, 542 (1975)). In Leon, the Court held that the exclusionary rule does not apply in cases where “the offending officers acted in the objectively
Third, courts must balance the benefits of deterrence against the costs of excluding reliable evidence. Id. at 141; Leon, 468 U.S. at 906-07. “[T]o the extent that application of the exclusionary rule could provide some incremental deterrent, that possible benefit must be weighed against the substantial social costs exacted by the exclusionary rule.” Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 352-53 (1987) (internal quotations omitted). The Court has described the appropriate balance, stating that the “police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that еxclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.” Herring, 555 U.S. at 144.
Finally, and related to the second principle discussed above, the Court has im-posed an important limit on law enforce-ment‘s ability to invoke the good faith exception. Leon made clear that the “benefits produced by suppressing evidence ob-tained in objectively reasonable reliance on a subsequently invalidated search war-rant” are “marginal or nonexistent,” and are therefore outweighed by the costs of exclusion. Leon, 468 U.S. at 922. But in other cases, where law enforce-ment‘s reliance is not “objectively reasonable,” exclusion remains an appropriate remedy. Id. at 922-23. A number of recent Supreme Court cases have discussed this “objectively reason-able” requirement in the context of police officers relying on law enforcement data-bases.
In both Herring and Evans, defendants were detained after electronic warrant data-bases reported to law enforcement that there were outstanding warrants for their arrest. Herring, 555 U.S. at 137; Evans, 514 U.S. at 4. In both cases, however, the databases pro-vided outdated information; Herring‘s warrant had been recalled, Herring, 555 U.S. at 138, and Evans’ warrant had been quashed, Evans, 514 U.S. at 4. Notwithstanding the constitutional violations, the Supreme Court declined to suppress the evidence, finding that thе officers’ reliance on the warrant databases was objectively reasonable. In a concur-ring opinion in Evans, Justice O‘Connor cautioned that blind reliance on (potential-ly unreliable) law enforcement databases might be unreasonable, precluding claims of good faith. “Surely it would not be reasonable for the police to rely, say, on a recordkeeping system, their own or some other agency‘s, that has no mechanism to ensure its accuracy over time and that routinely leads to false arrests.” Evans, 514 U.S. at 17 (O‘Connor, J., concur-ring). Later, in Herring, Justice Gins-burg‘s dissenting opinion echoed similar concerns, arguing that application of the exclusionary rule incentivizes lаw enforce-ment agencies to maintain their databases
B. Analysis
With these principles guiding our analysis, we turn to the case at bar. We review the district court‘s decisiоn to apply the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule de novo. United States v. Johnson, 408 F.3d 1313, 1320 (10th Cir.2005). Resolution of this case turns on our an-swers to two important questions. We note at the outset that, for purposes of this dual inquiry, we are assuming, but not deciding, that there was a constitutional violation. Cf. Herring, 555 U.S. at 139. With that assumption in hand, we first ask whether the trooper‘s conduct was deliberate, reckless, or gross-ly negligent, such that similar conduct could and should be deterred through ex-clusion. Second, we ask whether any such constitutional violation was the product of recurring or systemic negligence. On the facts of this case, we answer both of these questions in the negative.
We turn first to an assessment of the trooper‘s individual conduct. In Mr. Es-quivel-Rios‘s view, the district court erro-neously concluded “a reasonable officer in Dean‘s position could reasonably assume that Colorado maintained a record of tem-porary tags in a database available to law enforcement.” Aplt. Br. 27 (quoting Esquivel-Rios, 39 F.Supp.3d at 1188). He contends that, given both the trooper‘s previous experience with temporary tags and Lathan‘s statement, it constituted gross negligence to rely on a “no return” report as the foundation for a reasonable suspicion determination. We disagree that the trooper‘s conduct rises to a level of culpability warranting exclusion.
In our view, Lathan‘s statement is the only complicating factor in an otherwise straight-forward case. Absent that state-ment, the record reflects only a Kansas State Trooper with no first-hand knowl-edge of how the relevant Colorado data-base works, who believes the database is reliable, and who mistakenly recalls ob-taining registration information for Colora-do temporary tags in the past. As the district court noted, there was no evidence to suggest the trooper intentionally re-mained unaware of how Colorado main-tained registration information for tempo-rary tags, and he had received no training about the type of informаtion that is or is not entered into the Colorado database. Moreover, we note that, at the time of the stop, at least one Tenth Circuit case had found reasonable suspicion based on simi-lar reports. See, e.g., Cortez-Galaviz, 495 F.3d 1203; Garcia-Ballesteros, 74 F.3d 1250; cf. Davis v. United States, — U.S. —, 131 S.Ct. 2419, 180 L.Ed.2d 285 (2011).
The fact of Lathan‘s statement, howev-er, complicates matters somewhat. We are left to consider whether the content and nature of that statement renders the trooper‘s reliance on the database objec-tively unreasonable. For several reasons we decline to hold that this statement, standing alone, renders that reliance ob-jectively unreasonable. For starters, we agreе with the district court that Lathan‘s
All that aside, we simply cannot con-clude that the trooper‘s conduct was “suffi-ciently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice sys-tem.” Herring, 555 U.S. at 144. “We have never suggested that the exclusionary rule must apply in every cir-cumstance in which it might provide mar-ginal deterrence.” Id. at 141. Here, Lathan‘s statement, made in response to Trooper Dean‘s request for clarification, would not have put a reasonable officer on notice that the entire database was unreliable. With-out such notice, there is no misconduct to deter; there is only objectively reasonable law enforcement activity. It might be a different case if we were considering a Colorado law enforcement officer‘s reliance on a CCIC database report; record evi-dence suggests that Colorado law enforce-ment personnel were aware that the CCIC database did not contain temporary tag registration information. But such facts are not before us.
Turning to the issue of recurring or systemic negligence, Mr. Esquivel-Rios urges this court to focus on the conduct of CBI, as operators of the database that led to the assumed constitutional violation. He argues that CBI knowingly “laid the groundwork for future false arrests,” Aplt. Br. 18, and did so in violation of both Colorado law and a Federal Bureau of Investigation mandate, id. at 19.
We reject the argument that any Fourth Amendment violation was the result of re-curring or systemic negligence on behalf of CBI. Mindful of the Supreme Court‘s cau-tion concerning databases rife with sys-temic errors, we read thosе cautionary statements as admonishments to law en-forcement to avoid bootstrapping. But even if those statements could be or should be interpreted more broadly, they cannot fairly be interpreted to mean that every law enforcement agency using something less than an all-encompassing database is systemically negligent. Of course, the cre-ation and maintenance of comprehensive law enforcement databases implicates poli-cy decisions, including decisions about re-source and personnel allocation, as well as interagency information-sharing. While we would not sanction a law enforcеment regime that routinely leads to false arrests due to grossly mismanaged databases, we decline to find gross mismanagement where one agency (CDOR) has the infor-mation that another agency (CBI) needs to maintain a complete database. As the dis-trict court correctly noted, there is no evidence that CBI negligently failed to update its database or routinely made rec-ord-keeping errors—it simply did not have the information it needed.
We also find unpersuasive Mr. Esquiv-el-Rios’ argument that CBI‘s operation of the CCIC database ran afoul of an FBI mandate and Colorado statute. First, he provides no support for his argument con-cerning a federal mandate. Second, the Colorado statute he relies on,
Here, a law enforcement officer of one state relied on the law enforcement dаta-base of another state. The record does not support a finding that his reliance was reckless, grossly negligent, or otherwise objectively unreasonable. It also does not support a finding that the Colorado Bu-reau of Investigation, by failing to obtain and report temporary tag information in its database in 2010, negligently main-tained a database it knew was leading to unconstitutional detentions. Accordingly, exclusion is not warranted.
The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
KELLY
Circuit Judge
R. Wayne KLEIN, the Court-Appointed Receiver of U.S. Ventures LC, Win-some Investment Trust, and the assets of Robert J. Andres and Robert L. Holloway, Plaintiff--Appellee, v. William R. CORNELIUS, and Cor-nelius & Salhab, Defendants-Appellants. U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commission, Amiсus Curiae.
No. 14-4024.
United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.
May 27, 2015.
Notes
Brandifino, 896 N.Y.S.2d at 630. Indeed, the party that seeks a stay of federal litigation so as to proceed through arbitration typically “is careful to preserve its right to arbitrate by timely paying the fees required by the arbitration process, by not litigating elsewhere, and by faithfully abiding by the supposedly ‘speedy’ and ‘summary’ procedures afforded to the parties at arbitration.” Garcia, 2010 WL 3259922, *2. Here, Mr. Cahill originally sought a stay of the district court proceedings to pursue arbitration. But then he failed to meet the AAA‘s fee requirements. Now he seeks to keep the stay in place for more arbitral proceedings, which he thwarted in the first place.[W]hen the purpose of arbitration—to provide a cost-effective and efficient means of resolving a claim—is thwarted by a party‘s default in failing to pay the required fees[,] the Court believes that the paying party‘s right to have its dispute adjudicated and not to be unreasonably held at the mercy of a nonpaying party outweighs the strong presumption in favor of arbitration....