Fifth Circuit: Briefly Examining Mailing Label Is Not Fourth Amendment ‘Seizure’
This case law update was written by James P. Garay Heelan, an attorney at the law firm of Shaw Bransford & Roth, where he has practiced federal personnel and employment law since 2012. Mr. Heelan represents federal personnel across the Executive Branch, including career senior executives, law enforcement officers, foreign service officers, intelligence officers, and agencies in matters of federal personnel and employment law.
Temporarily removing a package from mail processing to examine its exterior does not constitute a Fourth Amendment seizure, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently held.
On June 4, 2008, Norbert Jaworowski, a contractor hired by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, observed Mark Randall Jones enter a Los Angeles post office, place two small boxes in the mail chute, and leave. Experiencing “a gut feeling that something was going on,” Jaworowski noted the license plate of the vehicle in which Jones departed and retrieved Jones’s two packages from the mail chute. Both packages listed “Delilah Maddox” of Jackson, Mississippi as the sender, and “Horace Hampton” as the recipient at two different Mississippi addresses.
Jaworowski contacted Postal Inspector Robert Kay in Jackson, Mississippi and reported his suspicions. After Kay received Jones’s packages in Mississippi, he arranged for a canine inspection within a parcel lineup, which alerted to the packages. On June 6, 2008, Kay obtained a warrant for the two packages and opened them that same day. Each package contained approximately two kilograms of cocaine.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department used the address on Jones’s vehicle registration to identify two postal rental boxes. They obtained a search warrant for some of the California addresses associated with Jones. Law enforcement executed that warrant and seized evidence including ten kilograms of cocaine and almost $400,000 in currency.
In October 2009, a grand jury indicted Jones on two counts of intent to distribute cocaine. Jones was arrested six years later in September 2015. Prior to trial, among other motions, Jones moved to suppress all evidence gathered from the seizure of the two packages. He argued that Jaworowski violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable seizures when he removed the packages from the mail and detained them for inspection. The trial court denied the motion to suppress, holding Jaworowski’s seizure was “justified” by the suspicious return and delivery addresses on the packaged. The jury convicted Jones on both counts and the trial court sentenced him to 360 months of imprisonment.
Jones appealed his conviction to the Fifth Circuit on multiple grounds, including the trial court’s decision denying his motion to suppress the package-related evidence. He argued the trial court erred because the Fourth Amendment seizure occurred when Jaworowski removed the packages from the mail chute, before he saw the suspicious addresses.
The Fifth Circuit analyzed Jones’s case for whether Jaworowski’s removal of the two packages from the mail chute based on his “gut feeling” constituted “some meaningful interference” with Jones’s “possessory interest” in the packages. The Court held it was “common-sense” that sealed packages placed into the mail would be examined for their outward form and weight, and that such examination does not amount to a Fourth Amendment “seizure.” Applying that principle to Jones’s case, the Court held that any Fourth Amendment seizure occurred after Jaworowski read the labels on the two packages.
Further, the Court agreed with the trial court that the nature of the packages’ labels gave rise to a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity sufficient to justify detaining the packages and subjecting them to a parcel lineup. The Court thus held the trial court properly denied Jones’s motion to suppress the package-related evidence.
The Firth Circuit additionally denied Jones’s other grounds for appeal and affirmed the trial court’s judgment.
Read the Fifth Circuit’s full opinion in United States v. Jones.
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