United States v. Clariot, No. 09-5783 (6th Cir. 2011)
Annotate this Case
Police investigated an airplane landing at an unstaffed airport in Jackson, Tennessee at 9:00 p.m., approached the plane, and asked three occupants for identification. A warrant check came up clean. The officers returned the identifications, chatted with the men for 10-15 minutes, and asked for consent to search the plane. The pilots refused, nervously, according to the officers, climbed back into the plane, and flew to Nashville, where local police discovered 70 kilograms of cocaine hidden in the plane. The district court suppressed the officers' account of what happened at the Jackson airport. The Sixth Circuit reversed. The evidence was not the product of an illegal seizure, so the exclusionary rule does not apply. Defendants' contact with police was relatively short in duration and non-threatening and defendants did not establish any causative link between the alleged police misconduct and the evidentiary discovery.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.