State of Arizona v. Emilio Jean

CourtArizona Supreme Court
DecidedJanuary 3, 2018
DocketCR-16-0283-PR
StatusPublished

This text of State of Arizona v. Emilio Jean (State of Arizona v. Emilio Jean) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Arizona Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State of Arizona v. Emilio Jean, (Ark. 2018).

Opinion

IN THE

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF ARIZONA STATE OF ARIZONA, Appellee,

v.

EMILIO JEAN, Appellant.

No. CR-16-0283-PR Filed January 3, 2018

Appeal from the Superior Court in Coconino County The Honorable Cathleen Brown Nichols, Judge No. CR2012-00246 AFFIRMED

Opinion of the Court of Appeals, Division One 239 Ariz. 495 (App. 2016) VACATED IN PART

COUNSEL:

Mark Brnovich, Arizona Attorney General, Dominic Draye, Solicitor General, Joseph T. Maziarz, Chief Counsel, Criminal Appeals Section, Terry M. Crist, III (argued), Assistant Attorney General, Phoenix, Attorneys for State of Arizona

Sandra Diehl, Coconino County Public Defender, Brad Bransky (argued), Deputy Public Defender, Flagstaff, Attorneys for Emilio Jean

Stefan M. Palys, Stinson Leonard Street, LLP, Phoenix, and Kathleen E. Brody, American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Arizona, Phoenix, Attorneys for Amicus Curiae American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona

David J. Euchner (argued), Slade E. Smith, Rule 38(d) Certified Law Student, Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, Tucson, Attorneys for Amicus Curiae Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice STATE V. JEAN Opinion of the Court

CHIEF JUSTICE BALES authored the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II(A), (B), (C), and (D), in which JUSTICES BRUTINEL, TIMMER, and BOLICK joined. VICE CHIEF JUSTICE PELANDER authored the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts II(E) and III, in which JUSTICES BRUTINEL, TIMMER, and GOULD and JUDGE ESPINOSA joined. CHIEF JUSTICE BALES, joined by JUSTICE BOLICK, filed an opinion dissenting in part and dissenting in the judgment. VICE CHIEF JUSTICE PELANDER, joined by JUSTICE GOULD and JUDGE ESPINOSA, filed an opinion dissenting in part. JUSTICE BOLICK filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part.

BALES, C.J., opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II(A), (B), (C), and (D); and PELANDER, V.C.J., opinion of the Court with respect to Parts II(E) and III:

¶1 We consider whether the Fourth Amendment rights of defendant Emilio Jean, a passenger of a truck that he sometimes drove while accompanied by its owner, were violated when police officers collected information over several days from a Global Positioning System (“GPS”) tracking device they had placed on the truck without obtaining a warrant. GPS tracking may constitute a search for Fourth Amendment purposes if its use involves a common law trespass, United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), or invades a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy, Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). Although we conclude Jean was subjected to a warrantless search that violated his reasonable expectation of privacy and thus his Fourth Amendment rights, the evidence obtained need not be suppressed because the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies.

I.

¶2 In reviewing a trial court’s denial of a motion to suppress, we

 Justice John R. Lopez IV has recused himself from this case. Pursuant to article 6, section 3 of the Arizona Constitution, the Honorable Philip G. Espinosa, Judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division Two, was designated to sit in this matter. 2 STATE V. JEAN Opinion of the Court

consider only the evidence adduced at the suppression hearing and view the facts and reasonable inferences therefrom in the light most favorable to sustaining the court’s ruling. State v. Valenzuela, 239 Ariz. 299, 301 ¶ 3 (2016). In February 2010, Jean and David Velez-Colon shared the driving of a commercial tractor-trailer from Georgia to Arizona. While the vehicle was in Phoenix, Department of Public Safety (“DPS”) officers became suspicious and ran a license plate search, revealing that the trailer, marked “Swift,” was reported stolen and that the truck was registered to “Swiff” with Velez-Colon as the company owner. Suspecting that the vehicle was being used to transport drugs, DPS officers installed a GPS tracking device on the truck without obtaining a warrant. Although the officers knew Velez-Colon owned the truck, they did not know Jean was traveling with him.

¶3 Federal Drug Enforcement Agency officers followed the vehicle to Tucson where they witnessed Velez-Colon engage in a suspicious hand-to-hand exchange. The federal agents continued their surveillance of the truck as it returned to Phoenix without dropping off a load. After the truck left Phoenix at 9:30 pm on February 17, 2010, and then as it traveled to California, law enforcement officers monitored it exclusively through GPS, tracking the vehicle to a truck stop, to a warehouse, and then back to a truck stop in Ontario, California, before it returned to Arizona. Velez- Colon and Jean took turns driving. Overall, the officers monitored the truck’s movements with GPS for about thirty-one hours over three days.

¶4 Assisted by the GPS location data, a DPS officer stopped the vehicle around 4:00 am on February 19 after it reentered Arizona. When the officer approached the truck, Velez-Colon was in the driver’s seat and Jean was lying, apparently asleep, in the truck cabin’s sleeping bunk. The officer asked Jean, as the co-driver, to present his driver’s license and logbook and asked about their journey. Jean said he was paid to drive by Velez-Colon. The officer separately asked both Velez-Colon and Jean for permission to search the truck; they each refused. After a drug-detection dog alerted to the trailer, officers searched it and found 2140 pounds of marijuana.

¶5 The State charged Jean with conspiracy, illegally conducting an enterprise, money laundering, and transportation of marijuana in an

3 STATE V. JEAN Opinion of the Court

amount over two pounds. Jean moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that the discovery of the marijuana in the trailer was the result of an illegal search because the officers lacked a warrant when they placed the GPS tracking device on the truck. Jean argued that the GPS tracking violated his possessory and privacy rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and article 2, section 8 of the Arizona Constitution. The trial court held an evidentiary hearing on Jean’s motions; he did not testify at the hearing. (Jean also unsuccessfully moved to suppress the evidence based on the officer’s allegedly illegal stop of the vehicle, but he abandoned that argument and therefore issues relating to the stop are not before us.)

¶6 The trial court denied Jean’s motion to suppress, reasoning that Jean, as a passenger, did not have standing to object to the State’s use of the GPS tracking device on the truck owned by Velez-Colon. Jean was subsequently found guilty as charged and sentenced to two concurrent prison terms of ten years, followed by two concurrent probation terms of five years.

¶7 The court of appeals affirmed. State v. Jean, 239 Ariz. 495 (App. 2016). It reasoned that Jean could not claim his Fourth Amendment rights were violated based on a trespass theory because he was not a bailee and did not otherwise have a possessory interest in the vehicle. Id. at 500 ¶¶ 18-19. The court also held that Jean had “no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements as a passenger or driver of the truck” because “a person travelling in a vehicle on public roads has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the person’s movements from one place to another,” id. ¶ 20 (citing United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 281 (1983)), “particularly where the government’s monitoring is short-term,” id. (quoting State v. Estrella, 230 Ariz. 401, 404 ¶ 12 (App. 2012)).

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State of Arizona v. Emilio Jean, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-of-arizona-v-emilio-jean-ariz-2018.