United States v. Ronald Lewis

RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION

Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b)

File Name: 17a0197p.06

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ┐

Plaintiff-Appellee, │

│

> No. 16-5181

v. │

│

│

RONALD C. LEWIS, │

Defendant-Appellant. │

┘

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Kentucky at Lexington.

No. 5:15-cr-00020-3—Karen K. Caldwell, Chief District Judge.

Decided and Filed: August 25, 2017

Before: CLAY, ROGERS, and SUTTON, Circuit Judges.

_________________

COUNSEL

ON BRIEF: Roger A. Cox, COX & COX, Fenelton, Pennsylvania, for Appellant. Charles P.

Wisdom Jr., Lauren Tanner Bradley, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Lexington,

Kentucky, for Appellee.

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OPINION

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ROGERS, Circuit Judge. This case presents the question of whether a warrant is required

for a police officer, not investigating any wrongdoing, to open the passenger door of a parked

truck to ask whether the sleeping occupant of the truck would be able to drive the occupant’s

intoxicated girlfriend home. Fortunately, the Fourth Amendment does not impose technical

prerequisites upon such a natural act of community service.

No. 16-5181 United States v. Lewis Page 2

On an evening in August 2014, local police officer Greg Turner responded to reports that

a woman was intoxicated in a Wal-Mart in London, Kentucky. Once inside the Wal-Mart,

Turner found the woman, later identified as Carol Lakes. Officer Turner noticed that Lakes’s

“balance was off, she was holding herself up by the buggy, she had trouble keeping her eyes

open,” and she was “nodding off.” Once he got closer, Officer Turner further noticed that

Lakes’s speech was slurred, her eyes “red and glassy,” and her mouth “real dry.” Officer Turner

concluded that Lakes was “clearly under the influence,” approached her, and “asked her if she

was all right.” Lakes told Officer Turner that she had been taking pain pills due to some back

trouble.

Officer Turner then asked Lakes if she was at the Wal-Mart by herself. Lakes answered

that she was at Wal-Mart with her boyfriend—later identified as defendant Ronald Lewis—who

was outside in his truck. Officer Turner responded: “Well, we’ll go see if your boyfriend’s all

right, talk to him and he can drive you out of here. You can go home.” Officer Turner also

suggested to Lakes that he would have to arrest her if Lewis could not drive her home. At some

point around then, another police officer, Rick Cloyd, arrived at the scene. Lakes told the

officers that her boyfriend would in fact be able to drive her home, and led them outside to her

boyfriend’s truck so that they could “check to make sure that he was all right to drive.”

The officers approached Lewis’s four-door Chevy truck, but, because it was dark outside

and the truck’s windows were tinted, could not tell whether it was occupied. Officer Turner

went around to the front-driver side of the truck, looked through the window, and saw Lewis

asleep on the passenger side. Officer Cloyd and Lakes went around to the front-passenger side

of the truck.

There is some dispute as to what happened next. Officer Turner later testified that either

Officer Cloyd or Lakes opened the front passenger-side door, next to which Lewis was sitting.

Lewis testified that it was Officer Cloyd—and not his girlfriend Lakes—who opened the

passenger-side door. For the purposes of this opinion, we adopt the district court’s assumption

that it was Officer Cloyd who opened the door.

No. 16-5181 United States v. Lewis Page 3

When the door opened, the interior dome light went on, causing Lewis to “startle[]” and

“d[o] a little jerk.” This light enabled Officer Turner to see that Lewis had a clear plastic baggie

on his lap. Lewis tossed the baggie over the truck’s console onto the back floorboard.

Officer Turner suspected that the baggie contained marijuana. Accordingly, he shined his

flashlight onto the baggie on the back floorboard, and observed that it contained “like a bluish

color stuff in it,” which he thought could be marijuana but might also be blue pills. Officer

Turner then opened the truck door, inspected the bag more closely, and saw that it did in fact

contain pills. Turner asked Lewis about the pills, and Lewis “stated that he didn’t know nothing

about them, and that’s all he would say.” Lewis appeared to be “under the influence” as well,

based on his slurred speech. Lewis and Lake were then both arrested. The bag of pills was

tested and found to contain 493 oxycodone 30 mg tablets and 5 pills of Xanax, the trade name

for the controlled substance alprazolam. An additional four Xanax pills were found on Lewis’s

person.

Lewis was indicted on various charges related to the possession of oxycodone and

alprazolam in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1), 846. Lewis moved to suppress all evidence

seized in his vehicle as the products of an illegal search. The district court, however, denied

Lewis’s motion. The district court found that, at least until Officer Turner saw the baggie, the

officers’ “sole purpose was to find Lakes a safe ride home,” and that the officers “were not

investigating a crime.” Accordingly, the district court concluded that the officers were initially

not engaged in “traditional law enforcement functions” and invoked the “community caretaker”

exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. See United States v. Rohrig, 98 F.3d

1506, 1521–22 (6th Cir. 1996). The district court further concluded that, once Officer Turner

saw Lewis toss the baggie over the back seat, “the officers’ function changed to the investigation

of a crime,” such that the community-caretaker exception could not apply from that point

forward. However, the district court also held that Lewis’s behavior at that point gave Officer

Turner probable cause to search the truck under the automobile exception to the warrant

requirement. See Smith v. Thornburg, 136 F.3d 1070, 1074 (6th Cir. 1998). In particular, the

district court noted Lewis’s possession of a clear plastic baggie, his “deliberately furtive” action

of throwing the baggie into the back seat once he saw the officers, his own slurred speech, and

No. 16-5181 United States v. Lewis Page 4

his girlfriend’s visible intoxication as reasonable grounds for belief that Lewis’s truck contained

evidence of a crime. Accordingly, the district court held that, based on the community-caretaker

and the automobile exceptions to the warrant requirement, there had been no violation of Lewis’s

Fourth Amendment rights, and so his motion to suppress was denied.

Lewis then pleaded guilty to two of the four counts against him—possession of

oxycodone with intent to distribute and possession of alprazolam with intent to distribute, both in

violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1), 846—but preserved his right to appeal the denial of his

suppression motion. Lewis now exercises that right and appeals to this court. On appeal, Lewis

limits his challenge to the opening of the door. But the Fourth Amendment does not preclude the

mere opening of the vehicle door in the context of these facts. The police here engaged in a

function that was entirely divorced from a criminal investigation, such that the “community

caretaker” exception to the Fourth Amendment applied. Therefore, because “[t]he standard of

probable cause is peculiarly related to criminal investigations, not routine, noncriminal

procedures,” South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 370 n.5 (1976), Officers Turner and

Cloyd did not need a warrant or probable cause for their limited intrusion on Lewis’s privacy.

First, the local officers’ action here fits within the community-caretaker exception.

Officers Turner and Cloyd responded to reports that a woman was intoxicated in a Wal-Mart;

observed that she was, in fact, intoxicated to the point of “nodding off”; and tried to get her out

of the store without arresting her by finding her a safe ride home. This case is similar to other

cases in which this court has applied the community-caretaker exception. See Rohrig, 98 F.3d at

1522; United States v. Brown, 447 F. App’x 706, 709 (6th Cir. 2012); United States v. Koger,

152 F. App’x 429, 429 (6th Cir. 2005) (per curiam). Most notably, in Rohrig, local police

officers responded to complaints of loud music blaring from a private home in the middle of the

night and entered the home without a warrant “for the limited purpose of locating and abating

[the] nuisance”—an action that this court deemed to fall within the community-caretaker

function. 98 F.3d at 1509–10, 1521–22. Similarly, in this case, local police officers Turner and

Cloyd responded to reports of a visibly intoxicated woman in a Wal-Mart, and approached her

boyfriend Lewis solely to determine whether he would be able to drive her home.

No. 16-5181 United States v. Lewis Page 5

Second, there is no evidence that the officers’ action was taken with any traditional law-

enforcement purpose that would make the community-caretaker exception inapplicable. The

community-caretaking exception applies most clearly when the action of the police is “totally

divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a

criminal statute,” United States v. Brown, 447 F. App’x 706, 709 (6th Cir. 2012) (quoting Cady

v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 441 (1973)). Here, the district court found that the officers’ “sole

purpose was to find Lakes a safe ride home,” from which the district court concluded that the

officers “were not investigating a crime.” In the context of a motion to suppress, such a finding

can be overturned only if clearly erroneous. Brown, 447 F. App’x at 708 (citing United States v.

Blair, 524 F.3d 740, 747–48 (6th Cir. 2008)). There was no clear error here: Officer Turner

testified as to his and Officer Cloyd’s purpose, which the district court clearly found credible;

furthermore, there is no evidence in the record to rebut this account of the officers’ purpose.

Accordingly, this case is similar to Brown, in which this court reasoned that the community-

caretaker exception would apply to a police officer’s stopping a vehicle because the officer was

not seeking to investigate a crime but only to question the driver as to the whereabouts of a

missing minor. 447 F. App'x at 710. Furthermore, this case is distinguishable from United

States v. Williams, where this court refused to apply the community-caretaking exception for

officers who entered a home, ostensibly to investigate claims of a water leak, but also because

they had grounds to suspect the home was being used to grow marijuana. 354 F.3d 497, 508 (6th

Cir. 2003).

Third, given the community-caretaking nature of the officers’ action, any limited

intrusion on Lewis’s privacy from simply opening the door was reasonable. Lewis was in his

car, not his home, which weighs in favor of the reasonableness of any search. As the Supreme

Court noted in the case that gave rise to the community-caretaker exception, “for the purposes of

the Fourth Amendment there is a constitutional difference between houses and cars,” because of

the “ambulatory character” of cars and the fact that “extensive, and often noncriminal contact

with automobiles will bring local officials in ‘plain view’ of evidence, fruits, or instrumentalities

of a crime, or contraband.” Dombrowski, 413 U.S. at 439, 442 (quoting Chambers v. Maroney,

399 U.S. 42, 52 (1970)). Accordingly, as this circuit has noted, “the community caretaking

function articulated in [Dombrowski] has been principally applied to the warrantless searches of

No. 16-5181 United States v. Lewis Page 6

automobiles.” Taylor v. Mich. Dep’t of Nat. Res., 502 F.3d 452, 462 (6th Cir. 2007) (listing

cases). The fact that Lewis was in his car also distinguishes this case from the two cases that he

cites in arguing that the community-caretaker exception should not apply. See United States v.

Washington, 573 F.3d 279, 288 (6th Cir. 2009); Williams, 354 F.3d at 508. In both cases, the

court held that the community-caretaker exception did not apply because whatever interest the

community had in the intrusion could not overcome the significant privacy interests in the

home—a concern that is not present in this case.

Furthermore, the officers’ intrusion into Lewis’s car was minimal, which also weighs in

favor of the reasonableness of any search. This is not a case where the police officers conducted

a search of the vehicle looking for drugs—for example, by looking in the glove compartment,

looking under the seats, opening the trunk, or opening containers in the car. Rather, the officers

merely opened the door to check on the apparently sleeping Lewis, which prompted Lewis to

throw the baggie containing pills onto the back floorboard of his truck, catching Officer Turner’s

attention. True, the officers apparently did not knock on the truck window or attempt to speak

with Lewis before opening the door, which might have been more respectful of Lewis’s privacy.

However, as the Fourth Circuit has reasoned, “the community-caretaking exception is not limited

to the least intrusive means of protecting the public.” United States v. Johnson, 410 F.3d 137,

146 (4th Cir. 2005) (citing Dombrowski, 413 U.S. at 447). Given that the officers’ opening of

Lewis’s door was minimally intrusive, any failure to knock or attempt to speak does not make

the officers’ actions here unreasonable.

On this appeal, Lewis does not challenge the district court’s reasoning with respect to the

actions of the police after they opened the door and saw Lewis toss the baggie onto the back

floorboard. Accordingly, we have no need to review the district court’s application of the

automobile exception to the subsequent search.

The judgment of the district court is affirmed.