United States v. Earl Davis
690 F.3d 226, 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 17217, 2012 WL 3518479 (2012)
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Rule of Law:
The good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule precludes the suppression of evidence obtained from an unconstitutional search when police conduct involves isolated negligence in an unsettled area of law, rather than deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent disregard for Fourth Amendment rights.
Facts:
- On August 29, 2000, Earl Whittley Davis was admitted to a hospital with a gunshot wound, claiming to be the victim of a robbery.
- Hospital personnel removed Davis's bloody pants and boxer shorts and placed them in a plastic bag on a shelf beneath his hospital bed.
- A responding Howard County Police Department (HCPD) officer, Joseph King, seized the bag of clothing without a warrant as evidence of the shooting Davis had reported.
- Following an unrelated arrest on drug charges which were later dropped, Davis's clothing was retained by HCPD.
- In April 2004, Prince George’s County Police Department (PGCPD) detectives, suspecting Davis in the 2001 murder of Michael Neal, obtained Davis's clothing from HCPD without a warrant.
- In June 2004, the PGCPD extracted Davis’s DNA from the blood on his clothing without a warrant and created a DNA profile, which did not match evidence from the Neal murder scene.
- Despite the non-match, PGCPD retained Davis’s DNA profile and entered it into their local CODIS database.
- On August 6, 2004, Jason Schwindler was robbed and murdered, and investigators recovered a baseball cap and other items containing DNA from the crime scene, which produced a 'cold hit' to Davis's profile in the database.
Procedural Posture:
- Earl Whittley Davis was charged by a federal grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
- Before trial, Davis filed a motion to suppress all DNA evidence obtained from the warrantless seizure and search of his clothing.
- The district court held an evidentiary hearing but deferred its ruling on the motion.
- Following a five-week trial, a jury found Davis guilty on all counts.
- After the verdict, the district court issued a written opinion denying the motion to suppress, finding a Fourth Amendment violation but applying the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule.
- The district court sentenced Davis to a term of life imprisonment plus 420 months.
- Davis filed a timely appeal of the denial of his suppression motion to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
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Issue:
Does the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule prevent the suppression of DNA evidence obtained through a series of Fourth Amendment violations that began with the warrantless extraction of a DNA profile from a crime victim's lawfully seized clothing for use in an unrelated investigation?
Opinions:
Majority - Judge Agee
No. The good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies, and therefore the DNA evidence should not be suppressed. The initial seizure of Davis's clothing was justified under the plain view doctrine because the officer was lawfully in the hospital room and it was a 'foregone conclusion' that the bag contained clothing that was evidence of the crime Davis reported. However, the subsequent extraction of Davis's DNA and creation of his profile for the unrelated Neal murder investigation was an unreasonable search that violated the Fourth Amendment, as a crime victim retains a reasonable expectation of privacy in their DNA. Assuming the retention of the profile in the CODIS database was also a violation, suppression is nonetheless inappropriate. The exclusionary rule's purpose is to deter police misconduct, and its application depends on the culpability of the officers. Here, the officers' actions constituted, at most, isolated negligence in a complex and unsettled area of law, not deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct. Therefore, the significant societal cost of excluding dispositive evidence of murder outweighs the minimal deterrent benefit.
Dissenting - Judge Davis
Yes. The DNA evidence is the fruit of several constitutional violations and should be suppressed. The plain view doctrine did not justify the initial seizure of the bag of clothing, as the officer did not have a lawful right of access to an item in Davis's immediate possession. Even if the seizure were lawful, the subsequent warrantless search of the bag was unconstitutional, as the 'foregone conclusion' exception does not apply to a non-descript bag containing mere evidence. The majority's application of the good-faith exception is an unwarranted expansion of the doctrine. The police actions were a series of deliberate and intentional choices, not isolated negligence, and the PGCPD's policy of uploading all DNA profiles was a systemic issue. Because the unconstitutional searches were the direct cause of finding the DNA match, the exclusionary rule should be applied to deter such conduct.
Analysis:
This decision significantly broadens the application of the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule, particularly in cases involving novel technologies like DNA databases. It establishes that even when police conduct is found to be an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment, evidence will not be suppressed if the conduct occurred in a legally unsettled area and was not deliberately or recklessly unconstitutional. The ruling prioritizes the societal cost of excluding evidence over the rule's deterrent effect, signaling that courts will be hesitant to suppress evidence resulting from police errors that can be characterized as negligent rather than flagrant. This precedent makes it more difficult for defendants to suppress evidence obtained through complex, multi-step investigations where police may have misjudged the evolving boundaries of privacy rights.
