7th Circuit grapples with case law in auto search ruling

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Just because a Kentucky parolee violated a rental car agreement should not prevent him from challenging a possibly illegal car search, according to a recent 7th Circuit opinion.

In a carefully worded opinion, the 7th Circuit in United States v. Kenyon R. Walton said parolee Kenyon Walton still had an expectation of privacy in the rental car even though he was driving on a suspended license and an illegal search revealed seven kilos of cocaine.

Case history 

On Aug. 29, 2012, Walton was a passenger in a Chevrolet Suburban he had rented when it was pulled over by a state trooper in Madison County, Ill. The trooper testified that Walton and his companion, Darrallyn Smoot, looked nervous, were breathing irregularly and lacked any luggage for their trip.

The trooper extended the stop 20 minutes and brought in a police dog, which alerted on cocaine. When the trooper extended the stop, he was allegedly unaware of Walton’s parole status.

Walton was later indicted on charges of possession with intent to distribute, and his attorney filed a motion to suppress the narcotics. The state asserted that Walton had no standing to contest the stop as a parolee who had violated the terms of his parole, driving on a suspended license and in violation of his rental car agreement.

At the suppression hearing before district court Judge Michael Reagan, the court first sought to sort out the actual status of Walton’s license on the day of the search.

The government presented an email sent Oct. 30, 2012, by an Illinois state trooper suggesting that Walton’s Ohio license one month after the arrest had a suspended status. Furthermore, when Walton was stopped and ticketed in Kansas for improper signaling the actual day he rented the Chevy Suburban, his traffic ticket noted Walton was driving on a suspended license.

These two pieces of evidence suggested Walton was well aware he was violating the Dollar Rent-A-Car rental agreement requiring drivers to have a valid license, according to the government. That made Walton both an unauthorized and unlicensed driver of the rental car, which under expanded readings of U.S. v. Haywood, 324 F.3d 514 (7th Cir. 2007) and U.S. v. Figueroa-Espana 511 F3d. 696 (7th Cir. 2007) should lose him standing to challenge the search.

In response, Walton asserted that evidence showing his license was suspended was “mistaken.” In fact he had a valid license on the day of his search and arrest, but failed to bring any other hard evidence of that fact at the initial motion to suppress.

The court weighs in

The district court found that when Walton knowingly violated his parole by leaving Kentucky without parole officer approval, and also violated the terms of his rental agreement by driving without a valid license, he lost his reasonable expectation of privacy.

Although Walton presented additional proof he had a valid license on a motion to reconsider, it wasn’t enough to sway the district court. Walton took a conditional plea and immediately appealed his conviction.

The three-judge district appellate court panel reviewed the evidence presented at both the motion to suppress and motion to reconsider, and agreed it was not sufficiently “clear error” to overturn the district court’s decision that Walton lacked a legal license.

However, the fact that Walton lacked a valid license did not bar him from having standing to challenge the search. But he would have to show that there was both a subjective and objectively reasonable expectation of privacy.

The appellate court agreed that Walton had a reduced expectation of privacy because he was a parolee. However, the U.S. Supreme Court in Samson v. California never went so far as to say that parolees have no right of privacy, according to the appellate opinion.

The government’s logic would essentially make any parolee vehicle search where the parolee was found in violation to be virtually immune from 4th Amendment challenge. The 7th circuit pointed out that the government failed to present any on-point case law that supported this proposition.

In reply, the government suggested that both the 7th Circuit and other district appellate courts around the country supported denying Walton standing, including the 7th circuit’s Haywood case.

In Haywood, the 7th circuit denied standing to challenge a vehicle search when the defendant was an unauthorized driver of a rental car, driving on a revoked license, according to the government. Like in Haywood, Walton was driving on a suspended license and could not be an authorized user of the rental car even if he somehow managed to rent the car and on paper become an “authorized” driver.

But because Walton was an authorized driver under the rental car agreement, that possibly created a different expectation of privacy, and made the case distinguishable from Haywood, according to the appellate court.

And the opinions of circuit courts around the county were too diverse and conflicting to provide substantial guidance to the 7th Circuit.

In one 8th Circuit case, a defendant driving a rental car on a suspended license still had standing to challenge a search because he also had permission to drive the car. In another 3rd Circuit case, the appellate court in U.S. v. Baker even found that a parolee who was driving without a license in violation of terms of his parole still had an expectation of privacy.

Without on-point guidance from earlier 7th Circuit or sister circuit cases, the appellate court looked to its own case law from Haywood and Figueroa-Espana. Did these cases really suggest that such a leap – that a driver without a valid license loses the expectation of privacy in any car – was supportable?

The 7th circuit appellate court said “no.” The court in both U.S. v. Griffin and U.S. v. Fiala suggested that 4th Amendment protections are not extinguished because the driver lacks a valid license.

In those 7th Circuit cases, there never was a question of whether the driver lacked standing to challenge the searches. If that were the case, then the 4th Amendment analyses of whether the searches were constitutional never would have been applied, said the appellate court.

The government’s second theory suggested that Walton should lose standing because he was in violation of his rental agreement due to his invalid license. Without the license, he lacked “consent” to drive the car from Dollar Rent-a-Car, so he had no objective expectation of privacy.

But that theory runs headlong into the 7th Circuit’s holding in U.S. v. Walker, 237 F.3d 845 (7th Cir. 2001), the appellate court explained, which said that a listed authorized driver on a rental car agreement has standing to challenge a search.

It is not the court’s place to try to understand why and how a car owner gives authorization. If the court recognized the government’s proposed exception where a rental car driver who violates the rental agreement has no expectation of privacy, it would “swallow the general rule of Walker.”

Lastly, the court confirmed that existing case law allotted a more substantial 4th Amendment right to the driver as opposed the passenger in a car. Because Walton was the only authorized driver on the rental agreement, his status as a passenger when the Suburban was pulled over did not minimize his reasonable expectation of privacy.

Accordingly, the district appellate court reversed the lower court decision to deny standing, and conduct further proceedings consistent with its opinion.