United States v. Johnson, No. 15-30222 (9th Cir. 2018)
Annotate this CaseThe Ninth Circuit reversed the denial of defendant's motion to suppress evidence found on his person and in the car he was driving. The panel held that defendant failed to show that the officers' decision to pull him over and to impound his car would have occurred in the absence of an impermissible reason. However, the panel held, in light of United States v. Orozco, 858 F.3d 1204 (9th Cir. 2017), that the officers' search and seizure of items from defendant's car could not be justified under the inventory-search doctrine where officers explicitly admitted that they seized items from the car to search for evidence of criminal activity. In this case, the government did not offer any justification for the seizure of the property other than the inventory-search doctrine, and thus the district court erred in denying the motion to suppress.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel reversed the district court’s denial of a motion to suppress evidence found on the defendant’s person and in the car he was driving at the time of his arrest; vacated his conviction and sentence for possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine; and remanded for further proceedings. The defendant argued that the manner in which the officers arrested him was a pretext to conduct the inventory search that followed. The panel held that the defendant failed to show that the officers’ decision to pull him over and to impound his car would not have occurred in the absence of an impermissible reason. In light of United States v. Orozco, 858 F.3d 1204 (9th Cir. 2017), the panel held that the officers’ search and seizure of items from the defendant’s car cannot be justified under the inventory-search doctrine because the officers explicitly admitted that they seized the items in an effort to search for evidence of criminal activity. Because the government did not offer any justification for the seizure of the property other than the inventory-search doctrine, the panel concluded that the district court erred in denying the motion to suppress.
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.