Person’s Presence in Suspect Building Insufficient for a Terry Stop, Seventh Circuit
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.
A person’s presence in the same building with some potential connection to a fugitive fails to establish “particularized suspicion” to warrant a Terry stop, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held last week. On that basis, the court of appeals reversed a district court’s decision denying a defendant’s motion to suppress evidence obtained during his prolonged detention.
In May 2018, an Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent was shot while conducting a covert law enforcement operations in Chicago. An arrest warrant issued for Ernesto Godinez, charging him with assault of a federal agent. Two days later, agents obtained cellphone location data placing Godinez’s phone at or near the apartment where Jose Segoviano lived.
Agents surveilled the apartment building and observed Godinez’s girlfriend exit. They detained her and several hours later, entered the apartment building in search of Godinez. Agents entered the vestibule of the building and were presented with a door to their immediate left and a door in front of them leading to a stairway to the second floor. Two agents went to the door on the left, and others went through the second door and up the stairway – which they then realized led directly into a second-floor apartment.
Halfway up the stairs, agents called out and Segoviano went to the top of the stairs. Agents then asked Segoviano if anyone else was in the apartment and asked for permission to search for whether Godinez was inside. Segoviano answered that no one else was inside and he consented to the search. Agents then removed Segoviano from the apartment, handcuffed him, and conducted the limited search which revealed no other persons inside the apartment.
After determining Godinez was not inside, agents brought Segoviano back into his apartment and seated him at his dining room table. While Segoviano remained handcuffed, agents questioned him for 20-30 minutes, without providing him a Miranda warning. When Segoviano asked whether he was under arrest, they said he was “detained.”
During questioning, Segoviano acknowledged possessing marijuana and cocaine in the apartment and the presence of a firearm for which he possessed a Firearm Owners’ Identification Card. Agents told him that, based on his admission, they could obtain a search warrant. Segoviano then signed a consent to allow agents to search his apartment.
The search of Segoviano’s apartment yielded four firearms, more than 2 kilograms of marijuana, and almost 100 grams of cocaine. He was subsequently charged with possession with intent to distribute both drugs and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime. He was never charged with any offense related to harboring a fugitive.
At trial, the district court denied Segoviano’s motion to suppress the evidence obtained during the interrogation and search, and Segoviano pled guilty to both counts under a conditional plea agreement that allowed him to appeal the denial of the motion to suppress. He then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. On appeal, Segoviano argued, in part, the evidence should have been suppressed because “the statements and search were the result of an unlawfully extended detention, which continued beyond law enforcement’s stated purpose, and therefore were not voluntary.”
The Seventh Circuit agreed with Segoviano. While “[t]he pre-arrest detention in this case was constitutionally problematic,” the Court bypassed that analysis and reversed the district court’s decision because “the continuation of that seizure after the sweep cannot survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny.”
The district court denied Segoviano’s motion because it determined there was no Fourth Amendment violation in either Segoviano’s initial or prolonged detention following the sweep because the detention was a proper Terry stop. Under the Supreme Court’s holding in Terry v. Ohio, the Fourth Amendment allows officers to briefly stop a person for investigative purposes where they have “a reasonable suspicion based on articulable facts that criminal activity may be occurring.” To satisfy that legal standard, officers “must have a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity here.”
The Seventh Circuit held the officers who detained Segoviano lacked a “particularized and objective basis” for suspecting Segoviano was engaged in criminal activity while they questioned him in handcuffs at his dining room table. Agents detained Segoviano because they suspected he could have been harboring the fugitive Godinez. But as the Seventh Circuit held, their reasonable suspicion rested on facts that could indicate to agents only that “Godinez might have been in the area.”
There were “absolutely no facts” connecting Segoviano or his apartment to Godinez or Godinez’s girlfriend. “At best,” the Court held, agents had evidence that Godinez’s girlfriend had been present in Segoviano’s apartment building and that Godinez’s phone had been detected in that same area. That made agents’ suspicion generalized to the building as a whole, not to Segoviano or his particular apartment.
Because the detaining agents had “no objective basis to suspect Segoviano of criminal wrongdoing other than his presence in the same building with some potential connection to the fugitive,” the court of appeals reversed the district court’s denial of Segoviano’s motion to suppress. The Seventh Circuit then remanded the case to the district court for further proceedings.
Read the Seventh Circuit’s full opinion in United States v. Segoviano here.
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