United States v. James Thompson

881 F.3d 629
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
DecidedFebruary 2, 2018
Docket16-4091
StatusPublished
Cited by16 cases

This text of 881 F.3d 629 (United States v. James Thompson) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eighth 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. James Thompson, 881 F.3d 629 (8th Cir. 2018).

Opinion

SHEPHERD, Circuit Judge.

Following an August 2016 jury trial, James Thompson was convicted of possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1). Thompson appeals his conviction. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.

I. Background

In July 2015, Sioux Falls police received an anonymous tip that Thompson was distributing controlled substances. While sur-veilling Thompson’s residence, police noticed a garbage container in the dxiveway, located between the garage door and the pedestrian door entrance to the garage. 2 Police then contacted Thompson’s garbage collection service to conduct a controlled trash pull. On a regularly-scheduled day of collection, police watched the garbage collector retrieve Thompson’s garbage container from its location, in Thompson’s driveway by the garage door and dump its contents in the empty collection area of the truck. Police then retrieved the trash from the truck and searched it, finding several drug-related items. The police conducted a similar trash pull the following week, which revealed additional drug-related items and a receipt for a storage unit. Based on. these trash pulls—as well as information received from an informant— police obtained a search warrant for Thompson’s residence, where they found 19 grams of methamphetamine inside a lockbox, $26,063 in cash hidden inside an ottoman, and drug paraphernalia. Police later obtained a search warrant for Thompson’s storage unit in Luverne, Minnesota, which contained an additional 115.1 grams of methamphetamine and $36,950 in cash.

Prior to trial, Thompson moved to.suppress all evidence obtained from .the searches, claiming -the warrants were based on unconstitutional trash pulls. Following an evidentiary hearing, the magistrate .judge recommended denying Thompson’s motion to suppress because no trespass occurred or, alternatively, because Thompson did not have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the trash. The magistrate, judge also found that probable cause éxisted for the search warrants even absent the information obtained from the trash pulls and, even if'the warrants were invalid, the Leon good faith' exception applied. See United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984). The district court 3 denied Thompson’s motion to suppress, adopting the magistrate judge’s report and recommendation in part by agreeing that Thompson did not have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the trash and that, even without the trash pulls, there was probable cause for the search warrants. Thompson was convicted following a jury trial and sentenced to 150 months imprisonment.

II. Trash Pulls

Thompson first challenges the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress. We review the district court’s factual findings for clear error and its legal conclusions de novo. United States v. Farnell, 701 F.3d 256, 260 (8th Cir. 2012). We will “affirm [the] order denying [Thompson’s] motion to suppress unless the decision is unsupported by substantial evidence, is based on an erroneous view of the applicable law, or in light of the entire record, we are left with a firm and definite conviction that a mistake has been made.” Id. at 260-61 (internal quotation marks omitted).

The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures .... ” U.S. Const, amend. IV. A war-rantless search of an individual’s trash violates the Fourth Amendment only where the individual has a “subjective expectation of privacy in [the] garbage that society accepts as objectively reasonable.” California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 85, 39, 108 S.Ct. 1625, 100 L.Ed.2d 30 (1988).

It is well established that there is no reasonable “expectation of privacy in trash left for collection in an area accessible to the public.” Id. at 41, 108 S.Ct. 1625. Thompson argues that because the trash was left in a container next to his garage— rather than on a street curb—the trash was within the curtilage of his home and thus he retained a reasonable expectation of privacy in it. Yet, assuming the trash was within the curtilage of Thompson’s home, “the proper focus under Greenwood [remains] whether the garbage was readily accessible to the public so as to render any expectation of privacy objectively unreasonable.” United States v. Comeaux, 955 F.2d 586, 589 (8th Cir. 1992) (internal quotation marks omitted).

The district court found that Thompson’s trash was readily accessible to the public. We agree. The trash was placed in a location from which the garbage collectors regularly collected it at the regularly-scheduled time of collection, suggesting it was placed there “for the express purpose of having strangers take it.” See Greenwood, 486 U.S. at 40-41, 108 S.Ct. 1625. Presumably, these strangers might “sort[ ] through [the] trash or permit[] others, such as the police, to do so.” Id. at 40, 108 S.Ct. 1625. The garbage container was easily visible from the street, and there were no barriers preventing access to the container or its contents. See United States v. Segura-Baltazar, 448 F.3d 1281, 1288 (11th Cir. 2006) (finding no reasonable expectation of privacy in trash containers left next to garage where they were “plainly visible and accessible from the street”); see also United States v. Hedrick, 922 F.2d 396, 400 (7th Cir. 1991) (“[T]he absence of a fence or any other barrier [is one indicator] that the garbage was knowingly exposed to the public”). Based on these facts, we find that Thompson had no objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the trash. We therefore conclude that Thompson’s motion to suppress was properly denied.

III. Sufficiency of the Evidence

Thompson next claims that the evidence was insufficient to show that he possessed and intended to distribute methamphetamine. “We review the sufficiency of the evidence de novo, viewing evidence in the light most favorable to the government, resolving conflicts in the government’s favor, and accepting all reasonable inferences that support the verdict.” United States v. Trejo, 831 F.3d 1090, 1093 (8th Cir. 2016) (internal quotation marks omitted). “Reversal is appropriate only where a reasonable jury could not have found all the elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt.” Id at 1093-94 (internal quotation marks omitted). Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the government, we find it sufficiently supports Thompson’s conviction.

To prove possession with intent to distribute under 21 U.S.C.

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

United States v. Michael Denson
138 F.4th 1091 (Eighth Circuit, 2025)
United States v. Larry Hayward
124 F.4th 1113 (Eighth Circuit, 2025)
United States v. Michael Watley
46 F.4th 707 (Eighth Circuit, 2022)
United States v. Emanuel Cowley, Jr.
34 F.4th 636 (Eighth Circuit, 2022)
United States v. Edward Hansen
27 F.4th 634 (Eighth Circuit, 2022)
United States v. Roy Burris, Jr.
22 F.4th 781 (Eighth Circuit, 2022)
United States v. Demetrius Jefferson
975 F.3d 700 (Eighth Circuit, 2020)
United States v. Nicholas Davidson
933 F.3d 912 (Eighth Circuit, 2019)
Thompson v. United States
D. South Dakota, 2019
United States v. Stephen Gustus
926 F.3d 1037 (Eighth Circuit, 2019)
United States v. Chauncey Brockman
924 F.3d 988 (Eighth Circuit, 2019)
United States v. Douglas Druger
920 F.3d 567 (Eighth Circuit, 2019)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
881 F.3d 629, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-james-thompson-ca8-2018.