Criminal – Search & Seizure – Conditions of Supervised Release

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case No.: 14-2860

Case Name: United States of America v. Gregory Sanford

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and POSNER and WILLIAMS, Circuit Judges.

Pertinent Practice Areas: Criminal – Search & Seizure – Conditions of Supervised Release

Passenger has standing to challenge validity of vehicle search. Search of rental vehicle lawful and reasonable given officer suspicions and criminal history of vehicle occupants. Conditions of supervised release reversed.

“Recently, however, the Supreme Court has held that such a seizure turns unlawful if it is prolonged in order to conduct a dog sniff (which requires bringing the dog to the scene of the stop, and therefore takes a while), without reasonable suspicion that there are illegal drugs secreted in the stopped vehicle. Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1609, 1614–16 (2015). But there was reasonable suspicion in this case (in contrast, in Rodriguez the Supreme Court remanded for a determination of whether there had been reasonable suspicion), given the factors listed earlier in this opinion that had made the trooper suspicious. Cf. United States v. Finke, 85 F.3d 1275, 1280–82 (7th Cir. 1996); United States v. Winters, 782 F.3d 289, 298–303 (6th Cir. 2015); United States v. Davis, 636 F.3d 1281, 1291–92 (10th Cir. 2011). Since the criminal history check was justified, Sanford is left only to argue that having finished the check the police dawdled in issuing the ticket, thereby gratuitously extending the time in which Sanford was trapped in the stopped car (“seized”). The trooper who had stopped the car spent several minutes chatting with a fellow trooper about sports and a euchre tournament while twice stating (then quickly correcting himself) that he wanted to wait for the dog to arrive before completing the writing of the ticket. The criminal histories that he uncovered in his computer search made a compelling case to wait for the dog—the trooper had reasonable suspicion of criminal activity at that point and so was justified in prolonging the stop for a reasonable time to confirm or dispel, with the dog’s assistance, his mounting suspicions. Only about eight more minutes elapsed before the dog arrived. That was not an unreasonable amount of time to prolong the stop. See United States v. Pettit, 785 F.3d 1374, 1378, 1383 (10th Cir. 2015) (reasonable suspicion justified the trooper in prolonging the stop by 15 minutes to wait for the arrival of the drug dog); United States v. Lyons, 486 F.3d 367, 372 (8th Cir. 2007) (a 31-minute wait for the drug dog to arrive was reasonable because there was reasonable suspicion that drugs would be found in the vehicle).

Affirmed in part. Reversed and Remanded in Part

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