United States v. Del Mundo Faagai, No. 15-10621 (9th Cir. 2017)
Annotate this CaseThe Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's order denying defendant's motion to suppress contraband seized during a warrantless search of defendant's truck. The court held that, under the totality of the circumstances, there was probable cause to believe that contraband would be found in defendant's truck and thus the search was permissible under the automobile exception to the warrant requirement. In this case, defendant was associating with a known drug dealer, defendant had been introduced to the dealer by one of the dealer's drug dealing associates, and law enforcement agents knew that the associate and dealer had previously engaged in three illegal drug transactions and that the associate had assisted the dealer in collecting a drug debt.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel affirmed the district court’s order denying the defendant’s motion to suppress contraband seized during a warrantless search of the defendant’s truck. The panel held that under the totality of the circumstances, there was probable cause to believe that contraband would be found in the truck, and that the search was therefore permissible under the automobile exception to the warrant requirement. Dissenting, Judge Kozinski wrote that the government, whose case rests on four meetings between the defendant and a suspected meth dealer, came nowhere close to meeting the probable cause standard, where officers, who observed most of the meetings and wiretapped the dealer’s phone, never saw a handoff of money or contraband, nor heard an explicit mention of drugs. UNITED STATES V. FAAGAI 3
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