United States v. David Orozco

41 F.4th 403
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
DecidedJuly 25, 2022
Docket21-4473
StatusPublished
Cited by26 cases

This text of 41 F.4th 403 (United States v. David Orozco) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. David Orozco, 41 F.4th 403 (4th Cir. 2022).

Opinion

USCA4 Appeal: 21-4473 Doc: 36 Filed: 07/25/2022 Pg: 1 of 15

PUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 21-4473

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.

DAVID SIERRA OROZCO,

Defendant - Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, at Raleigh. James C. Dever III, District Judge. (5:19-cr-00095-D-1)

Argued: May 5, 2022 Decided: July 25, 2022

Before KING and RICHARDSON, Circuit Judges, and KEENAN, Senior Circuit Judge.

Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Richardson wrote the opinion, in which Judge King and Senior Judge Keenan joined.

ARGUED: Richard Croutharmel, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellant. Natasha Katherine Harnwell-Davis, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Kenneth A. Polite, Jr., Assistant Attorney General, Lisa H. Miller, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C.; Michael F. Easley, Jr., United States Attorney, David A. Bragdon, Assistant United States Attorney, Jacob D. Pugh, Assistant United States Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellee. USCA4 Appeal: 21-4473 Doc: 36 Filed: 07/25/2022 Pg: 2 of 15

RICHARDSON, Circuit Judge:

David Sierra Orozco was paid to drive a car with over $100,000 in drug-tainted cash

hidden in a secret dashboard compartment. When police pulled him over, he acted

suspiciously: He quickly shut down the GPS application running on his smartphone and

struggled to answer where he was going with the money. His odd behavior continued when

he arrived at the station: When police found five SD cards wrapped in a $100 bill in

Orozco’s shoe, Orozco tried to destroy them by eating them. When police got a warrant to

search the phone and SD cards, things went from bad to worse for Orozco—both the phone

and the chips contained graphic and heinous child pornography.

Orozco contends that the search warrant for the phone and SD cards should not have

been issued. And without that warrant, the police would not have found the child

pornography he was eventually convicted of possessing. But we conclude that the warrant

affidavit presented a substantial basis for believing that Orozco was engaged in drug

trafficking, and that Orozco’s cellphone and SD cards would contain evidence of that

criminal activity. So we affirm his conviction.

I. Background

On a summer morning in Harnett County, North Carolina, Corporal Donald Lucas

and Deputy Benjamin Winstead each sat in separate patrol cars at the corner of Arrowhead

and Chicken Farm Roads. As passing cars slowed down to cross the nearby railroad tracks,

the officers checked license plates to identify any outstanding tickets. When a blue Lexus

sedan passed, Corporal Lucas ran its plate and found that its registered owner, Pedro Lopez

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Gomez, had a suspended driver’s license. The two officers began tailing the car and pulled

it over after it swerved across the centerline twice.

When they approached the sedan, the driver explained that he did not have a driver’s

license but provided a Mexican consular ID card identifying himself as David Orozco.

Orozco had a Samsung smartphone in his lap displaying a GPS navigation app. When

asked where he was headed, Orozco abruptly exited the GPS app but could not come up

with an answer to where he was going. After a bit of pressing, Orozco glanced at some

nearby fields and apprehensively replied that he was looking for farm work. Lucas noticed

that Orozco was “sweating profusely” despite the car’s blasting A/C and was shaking

nervously. J.A. 82. He also noticed that the dashboard was not flush and bore toolmarks,

suggesting someone previously pried it open.

Upon seeing all this, the officers called in a K-9 unit and asked Orozco to get out of

the car. While one officer ran Orozco’s ID, the other spoke with Orozco, who consented

to the car’s search. The K-9 arrived and, after alerting to the driver’s side door, was placed

inside the car. There, it again alerted to the presence of drug residue around the dashboard,

near the toolmarks. Officers opened the dashboard’s secret compartment and found

grocery bags filled with $111,252 in cash. When he saw the cash, Orozco volunteered that

he had been paid to drive the car and that the money was not his. Because Lucas suspected

that Orozco was engaged in drug-smuggling, he supplied Orozco’s phone number to the

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DEA. 1 The DEA advised that the number was linked to an ongoing investigation. The

officers took Orozco into custody for driving without a license and failure to maintain lane

control. Officers also retrieved the Samsung phone Orozco was using to navigate, along

with a flip-phone that was also in the car. Later, in a “money line up,” 2 a drug-sniffing dog

confirmed the presence of drug residue on the money. J.A. 150.

At the station, Corporal Robert Kimbrough searched Orozco’s person. He found a

folded-up $100 bill in Orozco’s shoe, and as he unfolded it, five micro-SD cards fell out

onto the floor. 3 Orozco quickly scooped up two of the cards and shoved them into his

mouth. Kimbrough managed to recover one SD card—though chewed and inoperable—

from Orozco’s mouth; Orozco apparently swallowed the other.

Based on this information, officers sought a search warrant for the Samsung

smartphone and the three operable SD cards. The application’s affidavit included a

1 Orozco gave this phone number to Corporal Lucas during the traffic stop, as contact information while Lucas was filling out the citation. This phone number does not appear to correspond to the Samsung smartphone that Orozco was using to navigate. It is unclear whether it corresponds to the flip-phone in Orozco’s possession at the time, or perhaps some different phone entirely. 2 In a money line-up, some cash is placed into a bag, and several identical control bags are filled with things other than the cash. The K-9 is then paraded past each bag. Here, the K-9 alerted to only the bag containing the money found in Orozco’s car. 3 A micro-SD card is an external storage device used to augment the storage of or transfer files between electronic devices such as cellphones and tablets. The micro-SD cards found on Orozco were compatible with the Samsung smartphone he was carrying. And the files eventually found on them suggested that they were used with the Samsung smartphone’s WhatsApp messaging app.

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detailed factual recitation, which told the same story that we have told here. 4 The warrant

issued, authorizing a search for “[r]ecords of illegal drug activities, documents,

photographs, . . . and other evidence of drug trafficking.” J.A. 39. Narcotics officers

began searching one SD card; they immediately saw what they believed to be child

pornography. A second warrant was then obtained for the SD cards; two SD cards

contained several hundred images and videos of child pornography. A third warrant was

then issued for the Samsung smartphone; its internal temporary storage contained five child

pornography images.

Orozco was indicted on one count of Possession of Child Pornography, 18 U.S.C.

§ 2252A(a)(5)(B). He moved to suppress the images on several grounds, including that

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
41 F.4th 403, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-david-orozco-ca4-2022.