United States v. Dunn, No. 18-2393 (8th Cir. 2019)
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The Eighth Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of defendant's motions to suppress evidence and defendant's 57 month sentence. The court held that the district court properly denied the motion to suppress evidence gathered during an inventory search where the officers followed departmental policy in impounding and inventorying his vehicle, and an inventory search conducted according to standard departmental policies was reasonable. Furthermore, the district court properly denied the motion to suppress evidence gathered during a search of defendant's vehicle where an officer observed crack cocaine in plain view inside the car before initiating the search.
The court also held that the district court did not abuse its discretion by imposing a sentence at the bottom of the Sentencing Guidelines range and the sentence was substantively reasonable. In this case, the district court allotted relatively greater weight to the nature and circumstances of the offense than to the mitigating personal characteristics of defendant.
Court Description: Shepherd, Author, with Erickson and Kobes, Circuit Judges] Criminal case - Criminal law and sentencing. Police officers followed the city's policy allowing the police to tow and impound a vehicle that is impeding traffic when the owner cannot immediately remove the vehicle on his own, and the inventory search performed prior to the impound was reasonable and valid; in a separate incident, drugs seen in plain view on a car's dashboard provided officers with probable cause to conduct the search of defendant's vehicle; the district court did not err in finding credible the testimony of the officer who spotted the drugs; bottom-of-the-guidelines range sentence was not substantively unreasonable; the district court acknowledged defendant's mitigating circumstances and did not err in determining they were outweighed by other 3553(a) factors. [ June 24, 2019
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