UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. DUSTIN CAYA, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 19-2469
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
Argued December 2, 2019 — Decided April 16, 2020
Before BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. No. 18-cr-108-wmc — William M. Conley, Judge.
Caya moved to suppress the evidence recovered from his home, arguing that the search was unlawful under the Fourth Amendment. The district judge denied the motion. Caya pleaded guilty, reserving his right to challenge the suppression ruling on appeal.
I. Background
On June 1, 2018, police officers in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, were summoned to a local business to check on a woman who was passed out in her parked car. Arriving at about 1:15 p.m., the officers identified the woman as Melissa Thomas and called for paramedics to transport her to the hospital. While they were waiting for the ambulance, the officers found a methamphetamine pipe in the car and suspected an overdose. They also noticed a child’s car seat in the vehicle.
At the hospital Thomas was initially too incapacitated to respond to the officers’ questions, so they returned later that afternoon after she was medically stabilized and more responsive. She told them that she had used methamphetamine in her car that day. When asked where she got the meth, she said that she and Dustin, her live-in boyfriend, obtained it together and shared it “as a family,” but she was unsure of the original source. She told the officers that she kept her meth pipes at home. They asked about the car seat. She said she had two children, a one-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. She was initially confused about where they were and who was caring for them. She later said that the children were at home and Dustin was supposed to be looking after them. She gave the officers her home address, and they called in a request for a welfare check on the children.
Sergeant Todd Miller and Deputy Matthew Small of the Grant County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched to Thomas’s home. Caya answered the door. He was sweating profusely, speaking rapidly, and his pupils were constricted, suggesting that he was under the influence of drugs. Sergeant Miller was familiar with Caya from previous contacts with him. The sergeant also knew that Caya was on extended supervision for a felony conviction and therefore subject to
The officers asked Caya about Thomas. He said she was not home. He assured the officers that he and Thomas were clean and that Thomas’s children were with their grandmother in Dubuque. Based on their observations and the information they had from Thomas, the officers initiated a search under the statute. They handcuffed Caya and did an initial sweep of the home, locating Thomas’s one-year-old child in the living room and methamphetamine and loaded rifles in a bedroom. In a second, more thorough search, the officers recovered
A federal grand jury indicted Caya for possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute, possessing a firearm in furtherance of that crime, and possessing a firearm as a felon. He moved to suppress the evidence recovered from his home. He argued that warrantless searches under Act 79 are unreasonable in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and alternatively, that the officers lacked reasonable suspicion as required by the statute. The judge rejected these arguments and denied the motion. Caya later entered guilty pleas to the methamphetamine count and the charge of possessing a firearm as a felon; the remaining count was dismissed. The judge imposed concurrent terms of 78 months in prison.
II. Discussion
Caya’s plea agreement reserved his right to appeal the judge’s suppression ruling. He no longer disputes the reasonable suspicion for the search. He focuses instead on his more general challenge to Act 79 searches, arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits law-enforcement searches of persons on extended supervision based on mere reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
This argument requires a bit of background on the relevant aspects of state sentencing law. Effective December 31, 1999, Wisconsin eliminated its old system of indeterminate sentencing, which gave the executive branch the discretion to release a prisoner to parole supervision prior to the expiration of his judicially imposed sentence. In its place the legislature installed a system of determinate sentencing that requires judges to impose bifurcated sentences with confinement and community-supervision components.
Thirteen years later the legislature adopted 2013 Wisconsin Act 79, the provision at issue here. It provides, in relevant part:
A person released [to extended supervision] under this section, his or her residence, and any property under his or her control may be searched by a law enforcement officer at any time during his or her period of supervision if the officer reasonably suspects that the person is committing, is about to commit, or has committed a crime or a violation of a condition of release to extended supervision.
First, in Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U.S. 868 (1987), the Court upheld as reasonable a probation officer’s warrantless search of
Next, in United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112 (2001), the Court again upheld a warrantless search of a probationer’s home, only this time by a law-enforcement officer. Because the search was conducted as part of a law-enforcement investigation rather than for probationary purposes, the special-needs doctrine did not apply. Id. at 118–19. The government urged the Court to uphold the search on a consent-based rationale, noting that the defendant had signed a court document acknowledging the conditions of his probation, including a condition subjecting him to warrantless law-enforcement searches. Id. at 118.
The Court declined that invitation and instead assessed the reasonableness of the search under its more general “totality of the circumstances” analysis, weighing the degree of intrusion on individual expectations of privacy against the degree to which the search “is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.” Id. at 118–19 (quotation marks omitted). The Court opened with an observation that “probationers do not enjoy the absolute liberty to which every citizen is entitled.” Id. at 119 (quotation marks omitted). The search condition, the Court explained, was clearly reasonable given the probationary goals of rehabilitation and community protection, and the probationer was unquestionably aware of it. Id. The Court had no trouble concluding that a probationer has a “significantly diminished” expectation of privacy. Id. at 119–20.
On the other side of the scale, the Court determined that the government’s interests in this context are very strong: recidivism rates are high and probationers have a heightened incentive to conceal their criminal activity and destroy incriminating evidence in order to avoid revocation and imprisonment in truncated proceedings that do not carry the right to a jury trial and other procedural protections. Id. at 120. The public-safety concerns tipped the balance: the governmental interests outweighed the weak individual expectations of privacy. Id. at 121. The Court held that a law-enforcement officer may conduct a warrantless search of a probationer or his home or property if the search is “supported by reasonable suspicion and authorized by a condition of probation.” Id. at 122.
Finally, in Samson v. California, the Supreme Court upheld a suspicionless law-enforcement search of a parolee. The
Samson controls this case. Formally and practically, Wisconsin’s extended-supervision system is parole by another name. Extended supervision is judicially imposed parole supervision—the second part of the bifurcated sentence imposed by the court.
Because extended supervision in Wisconsin is judicially imposed parole, an offender on extended supervision has no greater expectation of privacy than a parolee. And Wisconsin’s interest in rigorously monitoring offenders on extended supervision is just as compelling as the government’s parole-supervision interests in Samson. If, as Samson holds, a no-suspicion search of a parolee is constitutionally permissible, so too an Act 79 search—predicated on reasonable suspicion—is constitutionally permissible.
Caya resists this conclusion, arguing that extended supervision is more like probation than parole. Not so, as we’ve explained. He also insists that Knights and Samson—the cases involving law-enforcement searches—were narrow, fact-bound decisions that entailed a particularized inquiry into whether the defendant had notice that he was subject to a warrantless search as a condition of his supervision. But neither decision rested on a consent rationale, either express or implied; indeed, Samson and Knights were crystal clear that consent was not a decisive consideration. Samson, 547 U.S. at 852 n.3 (“[W]e decline to rest our holding today on the consent rationale.”); Knights, 534 U.S. at 118 (“We need not decide whether Knights’ acceptance of the search condition constituted consent … because we conclude that the search of Knights was reasonable under our general Fourth Amendment approach … .”).
Last, Caya urges us to adopt the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning in United States v. Hill, 776 F.3d 243 (4th Cir. 2015). There, the court held that a warrantless search of the home of three offenders on federal supervised release was unlawful. No release condition, regulation, or statute subjected the offenders to warrantless law-enforcement searches. Id. at 249. Instead, their release conditions subjected them only to visits by a probation officer and to confiscation of contraband in plain view. The Fourth Circuit suggested that the absence of prior authorization made Griffin, Knights, and Samson inapplicable. Id. As we’ve just explained, there is reason to doubt that understanding of the Court’s decisions. But whatever the merits of the distinction drawn in Hill, Caya is on the
The Act 79 search of Caya’s home was not unconstitutional. The judge properly denied the suppression motion.
AFFIRMED