United States v. Lickers, No. 18-2212 (7th Cir. 2019)
Annotate this CasePlain-clothes narcotics officers visiting a park observed Lickers, alone in a parked car, looking at his phone and watching children on a playground. Based on his movements, the agents thought Lickers was “tweaking,” and approached to offer him drugs. Lickers had a towel covering his lap and a cellphone on the passenger seat. The agents acknowledged that they were police, Lickers became nervous and attempted to knock the cellphone off the seat but continued placing his hands under the towel. Concerned that Lickers might have a weapon, they directed him to remove the towel. Lickers did so, exposing his genitals. An officer then smelled marijuana and radioed for a K9. The unit arrived 20-30 minutes later. A dog alerted. Lickers admitted he had marijuana. The officers found marijuana and placed Lickers under arrest. An inventory search of the car resulted in the officers recovering Lickers’s electronic devices. With a warrant, agents found sexually explicit videos of young children on Lickers’s phone. The state court granted his motion to suppress, concluding that the police lacked sufficient justification to remove Lickers from his automobile and lacked reasonable suspicion to detain him for 20-30 minutes. Weeks later, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Lickers’s phone, submitting a copy of the state search warrant application and disclosing that the prior search uncovered child pornography. A search of Lickers’s phone found pornographic images of very young children, including one video of a girl less than a year old. The district court denied his suppression motion. Lickers pled guilty. The court sentenced Lickers to 132 months’ imprisonment and a lifetime of supervised release. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. No aspect of the encounter in Monmouth Park offended the Fourth Amendment. The process of application for, and execution of, the federal search warrant reflected good faith.
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