Appellant Jose Alfredo Perez-Lopez (“Perez-Lopez”) is a 39-year-old Mexican with a third-grade education who speaks very little English. Perez-Lopez lived in the United States illegally beginning in 1999. In 2002, he entered a conditional guilty plea to a single count of producing false identification documents in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1028(a)(1).
On April 5, 2002 Perez-Lopez rented a motel room in Woodburn, Oregon. The next day Virginia Wang, a motel employee, entered the room to clean and noticed a large printer, a typewriter, pieces of identification, a lamination machine, and blank identification cards on the bathroom counter. Suspecting that the inhabitant was producing false identification cards, she called the Woodburn Police Department. Officer Rick Weaver drove to the motel, discussed with Wang what she had seen, and learned that Perez-Lopez spoke Spanish. He therefore requested a translator. Officer Bill Torres responded, and the officers proceeded together to Perez-Lopez’s motel room.
The precise events that followed are in some dispute. According to Weaver’s report:
We knocked on the door of room 120. The door was answered by Perez. Perez appeared nervous. I advised Perez we had received a report he my [sic ] be *842 making false identification cards in the room. Perez stepped to the door way-preventing me from looking into the room. Perez stepped into the door frame and placed his right shoulder next to the frame and then closed the door up against his back.
Perez paused for a few minutes and then let us into the room. Perez said he had been involved with making identification cards. Perez was advised of his rights and signed the [Miranda ] card. A consent to search card was also obtained from Perez. Perez consented to a search of his room.
Weaver’s report further states that Perez-Lopez answered questions about making identification cards and manufactured a Nayarit, Mexico driver’s license for Weaver, using information provided to him by the officer. While Perez-Lopez was making this identification card, Torres checked the sleeping area for evidence but found none. Weaver recorded the presence of a typewriter, a color scanner, a printer, a copy machine, a laminating machine, and a Polaroid camera, all found on the bathroom counter. The report added that there was also “a FedEx envelope with blank identification card stock and lamination material to make social security, INS, California drivers license and assorted other identification cards.”
Weaver did not testify at the suppression hearing, although he was present. Instead, Torres testified, stating that he was only on the scene to translate and was not an active participant in the investigation. Torres represented that his memory depended on Weaver’s report, yet his account differed from Weaver’s in some particulars. Torres said that after Perez-Lopez opened the door:
The conversation was real pleasant and cordial. We advised him of complaints from the manager [sic] that ... when she went in to clean the room, there was some laminating issue paper found in the room. We asked him if he knew of anyone that may be, you know, preparing INS or any type of false documentation or false identification.
[...]
At first he hesitated. He didn’t fully reply.... I asked him again if he knew anything about these illegal documents and after hesitating for a few minutes more, he said yes.
[...]
I asked him if it would be okay for us to come on in, into the room. At that point, he smiled and said that yes, it would be okay. What he did then is he opened the door fully open to allow us full view of the living section of the room.
[...]
At that point ... with his words as well as body’s [sic ] motions, we took that as consent to come on in, which Officer Weaver and I did.
Torres further testified that once he and Weaver entered the room, Weaver went past the beds toward the bathroom area. At that point, Weaver signaled to Torres that items of interest were there. Torres then read Perez-Lopez a consent-to-search card written in Spanish, which Perez-Lopez signed at 12:18 P.M. Torres also read him Miranda rights from the Spanish side of a prepared card, part of which the district court recorded as: “En caso de que no tenga dinero, Ud. tiene el derecho de solicitar de la corte un abogado.” Torres testified that the English translation of this portion of the Spanish warning he read to Perez-Lopez is: “In case you don’t have enough money or funds, you have the right to solicit the Court for an attorney.” Perez-Lopez signed this Miranda card at 12:20 P.M.
*843 On the stand, Perez-Lopez, through an interpreter, told a markedly different story. He testified that he opened the door thinking it was his wife and by then “the officer was already in — about two steps in.... [The officer] asked me where I had the drugs. [Before that, he] asked me if he could come in. I told him he was already in.” Perez-Lopez testified that after he told this officer, Torres, that he did not use or sell drugs, he was instructed to sit on the bed. After Perez-Lopez sat down, Weaver entered the room and went to the bathroom area: “When the officer went straight to the bathroom, Officer Torres told me to sign this little card that he had and that if I didn’t sign it that he would arrest me.” Perez-Lopez signed the card as requested, although he was unclear about how many cards were shown to him. He stated that he never told anybody that he gave the police permission to enter his room before they did. The government did not cross-examine Perez-Lopez.
After Perez-Lopez was arrested on April 6, 2002, Weaver contacted an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agent about Perez-Lopez’s production of false INS identification cards. On April 9, INS Special Agent Ted Weimann interviewed Perez-Lopez, after giving him a rights advisory, while he was in state custody. Approximately forty minutes after leaving, Weimann contacted Perez-Lopez by telephone and asked him if he had given permission to the officers to enter, whether the officers used force, and whether he understood the Miranda warning given at the Woodburn motel. Concerning this telephone conversation, which was not transcribed, Weimann testified:
[I asked Perez-Lopez if] prior to the police entering the room ... if they had his permission to enter the room. And he said that they did. And then I asked him if, prior to questioning him about the production of false documents, if they advised him of his Miranda rights, in the Spanish language, and he said that they did.
And then I asked him if he understood those rights, and he said that he did. And then I said, I just want to clarify one thing for sure to make sure that the police did have his permission to enter his hotel room and that they didn’t use any force to enter his hotel room. And Mr. Perez said that, yes, that was all true. And then he said on his own, he said, “I gave them permission to enter the room.”
On April 17, Perez-Lopez was indicted by federal authorities. He was arrested on April 22 and arraigned on the same day.
Perez-Lopez moved to suppress “all physical evidence, statements, and derivative evidence.” Denying the motion, the district court credited Torres’s testimony, which it considered to be “in accord with Weaver’s report.” The court summarized the sequence of events following the officers’ initial contact with Perez-Lopez as follows:
Torres testified that defendant hesitated at first, but then said he was making documents. Torres asked whether the officers would be permitted to enter the room, and after some delay defendant said it would be OK and opened the door. Torres testified that defendant indicated by words and gestures that the officers could enter the room.
Torres read defendant his rights from a consent-to-search card and a Miranda warning card, both in Spanish. After listening to Torres, defendant signed waivers on the back of the cards. 1 Tor *844 res testified that defendant did not appear to be under the influence of drugs and that defendant never said that he did not want to speak with the officers. He appeared cordial and cooperative.
In Weaver’s report of the search, he wrote that defendant was advised of his Miranda rights and “signed the card,” and that defendant consented to a search of the room. Weaver reported that defendant then demonstrated how he made identification cards with an instant camera, blank identification cards, and a laminating machine.
The district court found that the “[defendant signed the cards for consent and Miranda warnings, indicating that he had knowingly waived his rights.” The court also concluded that Perez-Lopez’s consent to search the room was voluntary. Finally, the court stated that the initial Miranda “warning was not so misleading as to require suppression of defendant’s subsequent statements.” 2
After filing his appeal with this court Perez-Lopez was deported to Mexico. Because a presumption of collateral consequences attaches to a conviction, we retain jurisdiction to review Perez-Lopez’s conviction.
See United States v. Verdin,
DISCUSSION
Denial of a motion to suppress is reviewed
de novo,
but underlying findings of fact are reviewed for clear error.
United States v. Cervantes,
I
Perez-Lopez first contends that the district court’s finding that there was voluntary consent to the entry into Perez-Lopez’s room is clearly erroneous, pointing primarily to inconsistencies between Torres’s testimony and Weaver’s report. The two accounts were similar in that both agreed that Perez-Lopez assented to entry into his room but did so only several minutes after the officers first made contact with him.
There were, however, some discrepancies. The story relied on by the district court was essentially an amalgam of the two accounts by Weaver and Torres, using Torres’s testimony to fill in the gaps of Weaver’s report. Although the district court stated that the accounts are “in accord,” the court actually relied on distinct features of each account to construct its findings of fact.
While there are some other minor differences, one discrepancy between Torres’s *845 testimony and Weaver’s report stands out: Weaver never reported an oral assent to the initial entry, while Torres did, yet Torres was only the interpreter and stated that his recollection of the events was hazy. Torres described a conversation he had with the appellant at the door of Perez-Lopez’s room, stating that he asked Perez-Lopez for permission to enter the room and that Perez-Lopez granted it, smiling and saying “yes, it would be okay [to come in].” Weaver’s report states only that “Perez paused for a few minutes and then let us into the room.”
For us to determine that the district court committed clear error, there would have to be no permissible version of the evidence emanating from Torres’s testimony and Weaver’s report supporting the events the court found to have occurred.
United States v. Working,
Perez-Lopez further argues that Torres’s testimony was impeached by comments the officer made to a defense investigator, to whom Torres recalled his initial statement to Perez-Lopez as follows: “We have a report that you’re dealing in false identification. If that’s true, we’d like to go in and search your room.” This minor discrepancy between Torres’s testimony and his earlier account is explicable: On the same day that Perez-Lopez was arrested, there was a similar incident concerning another inhabitant of the same motel “that was dealt with ... in a different way because of third-party involvement [initial denial of consent to search].” 3 Torres testified that there was some confusion when he spoke with the defense investigator about which of the two incidents they were discussing. A reasonable person could believe that Torres was simply mistaken about which case he went over with the defense investigator.
In short, the district court’s assessment of the evidence does not meet the threshold of clear error. As we have stated:
Even if other judges might have reached a different conclusion, “[i]f the district court’s account of the evidence is plausible in light of the record viewed in its entirety, the court of appeals may not reverse it even though convinced that had it been sitting as the trier of fact, it would have weighed the evidence differently. Where there are two permissible views of the evidence, the factfinder’s choice between them cannot be clearly erroneous.”
Id.
(quoting
Anderson v. Bessemer City,
II
Perez-Lopez also objects to the district court’s finding that his consent to
*846
search was voluntary and therefore valid. We are mindful that the government’s burden to show voluntariness “cannot be discharged by showing no more than acquiescence to a claim of lawful authority.”
Bumper v. North Carolina,
The district court correctly looked to our decision in
United States v. Cormier,
We note, initially, that the relevance of
Miranda
warnings to whether a consent to search was voluntary is not readily apparent.
Miranda
warnings do not in terms address the right to refuse to agree to a search but rather focus on involuntary incriminating statements.
See Dickerson v. United States,
Reliance on the
Miranda
factor in this context entered our circuit’s case law in
United States v. Noa,
While the police interrogators must faithfully carry out Miranda’s mandate at the threshold, they may then proceed to elicit responses, however incriminating, without further specific warning. To single out for further warning a request to search premises of an accused is to assume that a different order of risks has not been covered at the threshold. But that things which might be found in a search could be used against an accused seems implicit in the warning of the right to remain silent [.]
*847
Id.
at 164 (emphasis added). There was thus thought to be a prophylactic effect generated by the
Miranda
warning that extends to an accused’s subsequent consideration of whether to consent to a search.
But cf. United States v. Lemon,
The Supreme Court’s decision in
Schneckloth v. Bustamonte,
In any event, the district court’s analysis is incorrect insofar as it depended upon Miranda warnings. It supports neither the court’s finding that the consent to search was valid nor its failure to suppress the post-Miranda statements made by Perez-Lopez.
Torres’s credited testimony establishes that the officers’ entry to Perez-Lopez’s room occurred and Weaver proceeded to find some items in the bathroom area before any Miranda warning was given. Also according to Torres, the consent to search form was signed before Torres read Perez-Lopez his Miranda rights; consistent with that testimony, the consent form has an earlier signature time. When a Miranda warning follows rather than precedes the purported consent, it cannot support the voluntariness of the consent.
Because the district court erroneously considered the
Miranda
warning to be a factor weighing in favor of finding Perez-Lopez’s consent to search to have been voluntary, we remand for the court to reconsider the validity of the search by conducting anew the “totality of all the circumstances” analysis described in
Schneckloth,
Ill
The district court’s analysis of the sufficiency of the Miranda warning was also inconsistent with our case law. The district court stated:
Defendant argues that Torres used a fatally flawed Spanish translation of the Miranda warnings. The card from which Torres read stated in part, “En caso de que no tenga dinero, Ud. tiene el derecho de solicitar de la corte un abo-gado.” At the hearing, Torres translated this statement into English to mean, you have the right to solicit the court for an attorney if you have no funds.
As translated by Torres, the statement is arguably inaccurate to the extent it implies that a person who lacks funds is not automatically appointed an attorney, *848 but rather must “solicit” the court for one. I conclude, however, that under these facts the warning was not so misleading as to require suppression of defendant’s subsequent statements. “The translation of a suspect’s Miranda rights need not be a perfect one, so long as the defendant understands that he does not need to speak to the police and that any statement he makes may be used against him.” United States v. Hernandez,913 F.2d 1506 , 1510 (10th Cir.1990); see also United States v. Bustillos-Munoz,285 F.3d 505 , 515-16 & n. 6 (10th Cir.2000) (ambiguity in Spanish version of Miranda warnings did not make waiver invalid).
Miranda
itself stated that admissibility of any statement given during custodial interrogation of a suspect depends on whether the police provided the suspect with four warnings: “the right to remain silent, that anything he says can be used against him in a court of law, that he has the right to the presence of an attorney, and that
if he cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for him prior to any questioning if he so desires.” Miranda,
In this case Perez-Lopez’s warning was constitutionally infirm because it did not convey to him the government’s
obligation
to appoint an attorney for indigent accused. To be required to “solicit” the court, in the words of Torres’s warning, implies the possibility of rejection. While
“Miranda
itself indicated that no talismanic incantation was required to satisfy its strictures,”
California v. Prysock,
The Tenth Circuit cases relied on by the district court for its contrary conclusion actually support our holding. The law of that circuit is that “[a] translation of a suspect’s
Miranda
rights need not be perfect if the defendant understands that he or she need not speak to the police, that
*849
any statement made may be used against him or her, that he or she has a right to an attorney, and that an attorney
will
be appointed if he or she cannot afford one.”
United States v. Hernandez,
In
United States v. Bustillos-Munoz,
It is worth noting that a prior ruling by the very district court that decided this case properly ascertained a problem with a Spanish translation similar to the one on the card read to Perez-Lopez.
United States v. Higareda-Santa Cruz,
In sum, we conclude that Miranda as interpreted by our precedents compels reversal of the district court’s approval of the warning given to Perez-Lopez. As a result, Perez-Lopez’s post-Miranda incriminating statements should have been suppressed as improperly obtained.
IV
Perez-Lopez objects to the fact that he “was not indicted until April 17, 2001, eleven days after his arrest on April 6, 2001, and did not see a judicial officer until five days later on April 22, 2001,” so that there was “no judicial determination of probable cause ... within 48 hours” of his detention.
See County of Riverside v. McLaughlin,
V
As the voluntariness of Perez-Lopez’s consent to search must be reassessed and because of the Miranda violation contained in the Spanish-language rights card used by Torres to advise Perez-Lopez of his rights, we REVERSE the district court’s denial of the motion to suppress and REMAND for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Notes
. If this finding by the district court means that both warnings were given before Perez- *844 Lopez signed either card, it is clearly erroneous. Torres testified that he "obtained the consent form signature and then read Miranda rights.” There was no contrary testimony.
. Because the district court did not rely in its consent to search analysis on Perez-Lopez’s interaction with INS Agent Weimann or rule on the adequacy of Weimann’s Miranda warning, we do not address appellant’s arguments regarding that questioning in this decision. Should the issues remain relevant on remand, the district court can address them at that time.
. Officer Weaver's report states that another room in the motel was rented by a Mr. Pacheco, with a home address in the same Astoria, Oregon complex where Perez-Lopez lived. Motel employee Wang was also "suspicious” of Pacheco. Two hours after Perez-Lopez was arrested, Pacheco returned and, according to Weaver's report: "Sgt Torres speaking Spanish, obtained a signed rights and consent to search card from Pacheco. Pacheco admitted to making counterfeit identification cards and selling them. Pacheco gave permission to search his room, room 118.”
. The government does not challenge Perez-Lopez's custodial status at the time he was given a Miranda warning at the mote).
. In
Connell,
the defendant was first told that "you must make your own arrangements to obtain a lawyer and this will be at no expense to the government,” and later that "a lawyer
may
be appointed to represent you.”
