USA V. PARKINS, No. 22-50186 (9th Cir. 2024)
Annotate this CaseA man named Brett Wayne Parkins was convicted of aiming a laser pointer at a police helicopter. Police officers searched Parkins's apartment without a warrant after obtaining consent from his girlfriend. Parkins, who was present but not at the doorway of his apartment, verbally objected to the search. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided that under the Fourth Amendment, a defendant must be physically present and expressly refuse consent to nullify a co-tenant’s consent to a warrantless search. The court clarified that physical presence does not require the defendant to stand at the doorway — presence on the premises, including its immediate vicinity, is sufficient. The court ruled that Parkins was physically present on the premises and had expressly refused consent, so the search of his apartment violated his Fourth Amendment rights. However, the court upheld the district court's denial of Parkins's motion to suppress his pre-arrest and post-arrest statements because Parkins was not subject to interrogation for his pre-arrest statements and his post-arrest statements at the police station were not a product of the unlawful search of his apartment. The case was sent back to the lower court for further proceedings.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel reversed the district court’s denial of Brett Wayne Parkins’s suppression motion concerning the search of his apartment, affirmed the district court’s refusal to suppress Parkins’s pre-arrest and post-arrest statements, and remanded, in a case in which Parkins was convicted of aiming a laser pointer at an aircraft.
The district court held that patrol officers’ warrantless search of the apartment, to which Parkins’s girlfriend consented, was valid. After reviewing the Supreme Court’s cases regarding warrantless searches involving the consent of a co-tenant, the panel concluded that to satisfy Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. 103 (2006), Parkins must have both been present on the premises and expressly refused consent. The panel explained that a defendant need not stand at the doorway to count as being physically present— presence on the premises (including its immediate vicinity) is sufficient. The panel wrote that in light of the layout of the property and Parkins’s close proximity to his apartment, the nearby mailboxes bordering the parking lot where Parkins was detained were part of the relevant premises; thus, under Randolph, Parkins was physically present on the premises to validly object. The panel also wrote that it is clear that Parkins expressly refused consent, as Parkins’s statement not to let the police into the apartment expressly conveyed his objection and the import of that statement was especially clear following on the heels of his physical resistance at the doorway of his home. Accordingly, the consent-based search of Parkins’s home was unlawful.
Because Parkins was not subject to interrogation, the panel affirmed the district court’s denial of Parkins’s motion to suppress his pre-arrest un-Mirandized statements made while he was detained outside his apartment complex.
The panel held that the district court properly declined to suppress, as fruit of the poisonous tree, Parkins’s post-arrest statements made during his jailhouse interview. The panel concluded that Parkins’s statements at the police station were not a product of the unlawful search of his apartment because the officers did not confront Parkins with the evidence obtained as a result of that search. The panel also concluded that his statements were not a product of a purportedly unlawful arrest, as the police had ample probable cause to arrest Perkins before they found the laser pointer in his apartment.
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