United States v. Daniel
In United States v. Daniel, No. 23-30491 (5th Cir. May 2, 2024) (unpublished), the Fifth Circuit agreed with the district court’s decision to deny Daniel’s motion to suppress evidence found after officers had stopped and searched the SUV he was driving. Officers had reasonable suspicion to extend his traffic stop, and their canine’s alert gave them reason to search the SUV.
Daniel raised two main challenges to the officer’s actions: (1) they lacked reasonable suspicion to extend the traffic stop by requesting a canine officer conduct a dog sniff and by conducting criminal-history and license-plate checks, and (2) the dog’s alert did not give probable cause to search his car.
Issue 1: Did the officers lack reasonable suspicion to lengthen the duration of Daniel’s traffic stop? Held: No.
If officers “develop[] reasonable suspicion of additional criminal activity during his investigation of the circumstances that originally caused the stop,” they may detain the vehicle’s occupants for longer while they investigate. That new reasonable suspicion must be more than a mere “hunch,” but the level of suspicion required “is considerably less than proof of wrongdoing by a preponderance of the evidence, and obviously less than is necessary for probable cause.” Navarette v. California, 572 U.S. 393, 397 (2014) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).
Here, the officer who stopped Daniel witnessed enough “specific and articulable facts” to reasonably suspect that Daniel “was engaged in other criminal activity.” Daniel had been “traveling on I-10, which he knew from years of experience is a major drug-trafficking corridor.” Daniel also “appeared nervous while driving,” in part because he braked “abruptly” when he first passed the police officer’s car, and he then “drift[ed] over the fog line.”
The officer testified that both those acts suggested Daniel was “nervous about being near an officer because of criminal activity,” and he said that Daniel “continued to act nervous and evasive” after he was pulled over. Finally, Daniel said he arrived in town two days prior, but the officer found that inconsistent with “the trash and four to five large duffel bags that he saw in Daniel’s rental car,” which suggested to the officer that Daniel was instead “‘traveling a . . . long distance without stopping or . . . going somewhere, turn[ing] around and coming right back,’ such as to pick up and then deliver a product.”
As a whole, those observations were sufficient to give the officer a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, which authorized him to further detain Daniel while waiting for record checks and a dog sniff.
Issue 2: Did the canine’s alert give officers probable cause to search Daniel’s SUV? Held: Yes.
“When a dog’s alert is the purported basis for probable cause, ‘[t]he question—similar to every inquiry into probable cause—is whether all the facts surrounding a dog’s alert, viewed through the lens of common sense, would make a reasonably prudent person think that a search would reveal contraband or evidence of a crime.’ Florida v. Harris, 568 U.S. 237, 248 (2013).” If a “bona fide organization” has certified a canine after testing its reliability, courts may presume that the dog’s alert is sufficient probable cause to search a vehicle.
Here, Daniel failed to carry his burden of rebutting that presumption. He argued against the canine’s reliability because it “(1) alerted by the driver’s side door, not the back hatch where the drugs were later found; (2) had twice alerted in the field when no drugs were present; and (3) had performed only twelve field searches over the past three years.” According to the court, “the dog’s two false positives, over the course of at least twelve searches, ‘have relatively limited import.’” Quoting Harris, 568 U.S. at 245. That “83.3% field success rate” is enough to show a “fair probability” that the vehicle contained contraband, which is all that officers need to conduct a search.
For those reasons, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court’s denial of Daniel’s motion to suppress.