United States District Court, D. Arizona
ORDER
HONORABLE ROSEMARY MARQUEZ UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
Currently
pending before the Court is the Government's Motion for
Reconsideration. (Doc. 85.) The Government asks the Court to
reconsider its August 1, 2019 Order (Doc. 83) granting
Defendant's Motion to Suppress (Doc. 35).[1]The Government
argues that the Court's Order is manifestly erroneous
because the Court failed to consider (1) Defendant's lack
of standing to challenge the search of the garage wherein a
Jeep Liberty containing fentanyl was found, and (2)
Defendant's lack of standing to challenge the
voluntariness of the homeowner's consent to the search of
the garage. (Id.) For the reasons that follow, the
Government's Motion will be denied.
I.
Background
On
February 1, 2018, police officers observed Defendant drive a
Jeep Liberty into the garage of a residence at 5231 S. Via
Noche Buena. (Doc. 73 at 2.) A short time later, Defendant
and two women drove away from the home in a Chrysler Sebring.
(Id.) Officers later noticed the Sebring stopped on
the side of the road, and they decided to conduct a welfare
check. (Id.) Ultimately, officers detained the
occupants of the Sebring at the side of the road for one and
a half to two hours, during which time officers conducted a
dog sniff, searched the Sebring, discovered that one of the
vehicle's occupants owned the home at 5231 S. Via Noche
Buena, and obtained the homeowner's consent to search
that residence. (Id. at 2-3.) During officers'
search of the residence, a police canine alerted to the Jeep
Liberty in the garage. (Id. at 3.) Officers searched
the Jeep Liberty and found 15.44 kilograms of fentanyl in a
hidden compartment. (Id. at 4.)
Defendant
moved to suppress evidence of the drugs seized from the Jeep
Liberty, among other evidence. (Doc. 73 at 4.) Magistrate
Judge D. Thomas Ferraro issued a Report and Recommendation,
recommending that this Court deny Defendant's Motion to
Suppress as to the seized drugs but grant it as to other
evidence at issue. (Id. at 12.) Defendant objected
to the Report and Recommendation to the extent that it
recommended denial of Defendant's request to suppress
evidence of the seized drugs. (Doc. 74.) This Court partially
adopted and partially rejected the Report and Recommendation
and granted Defendant's Motion to Suppress in its
entirety. (Doc. 83.)
II.
Legal Standard
Motions
for reconsideration should be granted only in rare
circumstances. See Defenders of Wildlife v. Browner,
909 F.Supp. 1342, 1351 (D. Ariz. 1995). "Reconsideration
is appropriate if the district court (1) is presented with
newly discovered evidence, (2) committed clear error or the
initial decision was manifestly unjust, or (3) if there is an
intervening change in controlling law." School Dist.
No. 1J, Multnomah Cnty. v. ACandS, Inc., 5 F.3d 1255,
1263 (9th Cir. 1993). Motions for reconsideration will
ordinarily be denied "absent a showing of manifest error
or a showing of new facts or legal authority that could not
have been brought to [the court's] attention earlier with
reasonable diligence." LRCiv 7.2(g)(1).
Pursuant
to the Local Rules of Civil Procedure, "[n]o motion for
reconsideration may repeat any oral or written argument made
by the movant in support of or in opposition to the motion
that resulted in the Order." LRCiv 7.2(g)(1). Motions
for reconsideration should not be used for the purpose of
asking a court "to rethink what the court had already
thought through-rightly or wrongly." Defenders of
Wildlife, 909 F.Supp. at 1351 (internal quotation marks
omitted). Mere disagreement with a previous order is an
insufficient basis for reconsideration. See Leong v.
Hilton Hotels Corp., 689 F.Supp. 1572, 1573 (D. Haw.
1988).
III.
Discussion
Standing
to invoke the exclusionary rule is "limited to cases in
which the prosecution seeks to use the fruits of an illegal
search or seizure against the victim of police
misconduct." United States v. Leon, 468 U.S.
897, 910 (1984). In its August 1, 2019 Order, the Court held
that evidence seized from the Jeep Liberty is fruit of the
poisonous tree because "[a]ll of law enforcement's
encounters and searches," including the homeowner's
consent to the search of her home and garage,
"temporally followed, and necessarily flowed from,"
the earlier unlawful detention of the occupants of the
Sebring, including Defendant. (Doc. 83 at 6.) If the evidence
found in the Jeep Liberty was seized as a result of
Defendant's prior unlawful detention, then Defendant has
standing to seek suppression of the evidence as fruit of the
poisonous tree, even if he would not have had standing to
directly challenge the search of the garage in which the Jeep
Liberty was found or the homeowner's consent to search
the garage. Cf United States v. Twilley, 222 F.3d
1092, 1095-97 (2000) (holding that, although the defendant
did not have standing to directly challenge the search of a
vehicle in which he was a passenger, he had standing to seek
suppression of evidence discovered in the vehicle as the
fruit of an unlawful stop). Accordingly, the Government's
arguments concerning Defendant's lack of standing to
directly challenge the homeowner's consent and
the search of the garage do not show manifest error requiring
reconsideration of the Court's August 1, 2019 Order.
Nor
does the Government's reliance on United States v.
Pulliam, 405 F.3d 782 (9th Cir. 2005) require
reconsideration of the Court's prior Order. In
Pulliam, the defendant was a passenger in a car that
was stopped by police officers. Id. at 784. The
initial traffic stop was lawful but the prolonged detention
of the passenger during the stop was not. See Id. at
785, 788-89. In a 2-1 majority opinion, the Ninth Circuit
found that the defendant had standing to challenge his own
detention during the stop, but that he could not invoke the
exclusionary rule to suppress evidence of a gun that officers
found during a search of the stopped vehicle. Id. at
787. The Court reasoned that defendant did not have any
possessory interest in the vehicle and that the seizure of
the gun was not the product of the defendant's detention,
since the officers' search of the car and discovery of
the gun would still have occurred even if the defendant had
been immediately released. Id.
As an
initial matter, it appears that the reasoning of the majority
opinion in Pulliam may have been abrogated by an
intervening Supreme Court decision, Brendlin v.
California, 551 U.S. 249 (2007).[2] But regardless of the
continuing vitality of Pulliam, it is
distinguishable from the present case, because here
officers' seizure of drugs from the Jeep Liberty was the
product of officers' prior illegal detention of
Defendant. Unlike in Pulliam, it cannot be said that
officers would inevitably have discovered the evidence in the
Jeep Liberty regardless of whether Defendant was unlawfully
detained. If officers had released Defendant but had
continued to detain the homeowner and had still obtained her
consent to search the garage during her prolonged detention,
[3] it
is not inevitable that the Jeep Liberty would still have been
located in the garage when officers arrived at 5231 S. Via
Noche Buena.
As the
majority opinion in Pulliam explained, the result of
that case would have been different if the defendant had
shown that he would have been able to leave in the vehicle
had he been allowed to leave; in that scenario, the defendant
would have been able to show that the seizure of the gun was
the fruit of his own unlawful detention. 405 F.3d at 787;
see also United States v. DeLuca, 269 F.3d 1128,
1133 (10th Cir. 2001) (finding that evidence inside vehicle
would have been discovered regardless of the defendant's
presence where there was no showing that the defendant would
have been able to leave in the vehicle if he had been allowed
to leave). Here, if Defendant had been allowed to leave, he
would have been able to return to 5231 S. Via Noche Buena and
then leave in the Jeep Liberty. Because it cannot be said
here that the drugs found in the Jeep Liberty would
inevitably have been discovered even if Defendant had not
been unlawfully detained during the prolonged stop of the
Sebring and its occupants, the Government has not shown any
manifest error in the Court's prior holding that the
seizure of the drugs was the product of Defendant's prior
unlawful detention. And because the seized drugs were the
fruit of Defendant's unlawful detention, Defendant has
standing to seek suppression of evidence of the drugs.
See Leon, 468 U.S. at 910.
IT
IS ORDERED that the Government's Motion for
...