This Guy Was REALLY Good At Pretending He Wasn't Home

UNITED STATES v. DIAZ, USCA-9 No. 06-30029, 2007 U.S.App. LEXIS 14839, on appeal from USDC-DID, before USCJs Farris, Clifton, Bea, filed 22 June 2007.

LONG STORY SHORT: Arrest warrant subject was usually at home during the day, and agents observed no affirmative evidence that he was away, giving agents reasonable belief to force entry, and incriminating evidence they saw in plain view once they were inside would not be suppressed. Binding in AK, AZ, CA, GU, HI, ID, MP, MT, OR, WA.

FACTS: Defendant lived in his house, where he also repaired motor vehicles for a living, on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho. Defendant was the subject of an arrest warrant, which government agents [Note: the opinion does not say which agencies or tribal police they were with] went to his home one afternoon to serve. Agents had visited him at home during the day three or four times over the previous 18 months, and Defendant told them he was usually at home in the daytime. On one occasion, he took 45 minutes to answer a knock on the door. This day, the agents drove past several times, and did not see Defendant's black SUV but saw two people standing next to a red SUV. When it drove off, only one person seemed to be in it, and agents reasoned that the other person had stayed in the house.

Defendant had dogs and security cameras protecting his property, which discouraged the agents from approaching very closely. They watched the house for 90 minutes, seeing no activity, before approaching. They could not see inside because of blankets over the windows. Knocking on the door produced no response, so the agents forced entry through the door. No one was home; agents later found Defendant at a nearby casino and arrested him. While looking through the house for Defendant, an agent saw what looked like illegal drugs in a plastic baggie in plain view. The agents withdrew from the house, swore out a search warrant, and found a bag of methamphetamine and drug equipment.

PROCEDURE: The United States had already indicted Defendant in U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho on one count each of possessing a firearm while a drug user and while a convicted felon, hence the arrest warrant. Defendant moved to suppress all evidence found in his house, arguing that the agents had exceeded the authority of an arrest warrant by entering his house when they had no reason to believe he was there. The trial court ruled that Defendant had established a pattern of being home during the day, which the agents knew, but Defendant's cameras and dogs and blankets made it impossible to determine he was not at home. MOTION TO SUPPRESS DENIED. A jury convicted Defendant on both counts, and Defendant appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

DECISION: Arrest warrants give government agents limited authority to enter the subject's home and arrest him if they have reasonable belief (aka "reason to believe," "reasonable grounds for believing") that he is there. The Ninth Circuit had decided few cases elaborating on what reasonable belief really was. Commonsense evaluation of the totality of the circumstances is key to reasonableness.

Here, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the agents' experience of consistently finding him at home during the day, Defendant's own statement that he was usually home then, and the fact that Defendant did his mechanic work at home, gave the agents reasonable cause to think he would be home on an ordinary day. On one previous occasion, Defendant took 45 minutes to answer the door, so the fact that knocking produced no immediate response did not mean by itself that he was not home. Also, they had seen two people next to the red SUV but only one had driven off in it. The agents reasonably inferred that Defendant was home, and needed no direct evidence, especially since Defendant's own dogs, cameras, and blanketed windows hampered the agents' efforts to decide whether he was really there. DENIAL OF SUPPRESSION AFFIRMED.

EDITORIAL: This is one of those deals that you'd think comes up all the time on appeal, but according to the Ninth, I guess not, even with eight states and two, uh, whatever Guam and the Marshall Islands are. You often hear people say "but the evidence was only circumstantial." What they mean is, the evidence is just plain weak. Here we see that circumstantial evidence works just fine to support a reasonable conclusion. Dude needs to hide his drugs better, or at all.