United States v. Miguel Angel Martinez

Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit·Decided November 14, 2019·No. 18-2246·Unpublished

Opinion

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION File Name: 19a0570n.06

No. 18-2246

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT FILED Nov 14, 2019

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) DEBORAH S. HUNT, Clerk )

Plaintiff-Appellant, )

)

ON APPEAL FROM THE

v. )

UNITED STATES DISTRICT

)

COURT FOR THE EASTERN

MIGUEL ANGEL MARTINEZ, )

DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN

)

Defendant-Appellee. )

)

Before: ROGERS, BUSH, and LARSEN, Circuit Judges.

LARSEN, Circuit Judge. Following an interview with two special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miguel Martinez was arrested and indicted for possession and distribution of child pornography. He asked the district court to suppress all statements made during the interview, arguing that he had been “in custody” for Miranda purposes but had not been given his Miranda warnings. The district court agreed and suppressed the evidence. We REVERSE.

I.

Martinez was a police officer with thirty-years’ experience in the Detroit Police Department (DPD). In September 2016, a county sheriff’s deputy in Nevada used a peer-to-peer filesharing program to download child pornography from an IP address assigned to Martinez’s home in Trenton, Michigan. The deputy passed the information to the Detroit FBI office, and in February 2017 (while Martinez was on duty) federal agents executed a warrant to search Martinez’s home. In conjunction with that search, the FBI decided to interview Martinez.

To ensure Martinez would not be armed during the interview, FBI agents coordinated with DPD to set up a ruse that would send Martinez to the Detroit Public Safety Headquarters during his shift. A DPD supervisor told Martinez “to report to [H]eadquarters for the purpose of transporting a sick or injured police officer.” When Martinez arrived, two agents, dressed in plain clothes, asked Martinez whether he would help them with an investigation in Trenton, his hometown. Martinez agreed to help and went with the agents to a conference room in a separate portion of the Headquarters building. Reaching the conference room required taking a keycard- operated elevator to another floor and going through one set of keycard-secured doors. The agents had Martinez secure his firearm in a lockbox in the hallway outside of the conference room. FBI agents kept their own weapons with them during the interview but neither used or displayed them.

Martinez first sat down in a chair by the door, but the agents directed him to sit across the table, facing the door; the agents themselves took the seats by the door. They told Martinez that agents were executing a search warrant at his house in connection with a child-pornography investigation. They described how they had used Ares, a peer-to-peer filesharing program, to download child pornography from a shared folder linked to Martinez’s IP address. The agents described how they had cross-referenced the Ares account’s usage habits with Martinez’s work schedule and discovered that the Ares user was active and online only when Martinez was not on duty.

Martinez acknowledged using the Ares software but claimed that he used it only to search for music. He admitted that he sometimes came across illicit files, but he would immediately delete them when he did. The agents did not buy this story. When Martinez tried to downplay the nature of his downloads, the agents showed him graphic screenshots of the child-pornography videos they had downloaded from his Ares shared folder.

Throughout the conversation, both agents used a cordial and nonconfrontational tone. The agents did not handcuff Martinez or physically restrain him in any way. They also said repeatedly—nine times in total, on average once every nine minutes—that Martinez was speaking with them voluntarily, was not under arrest, or that he had the right to leave anytime he wished. Martinez’s own comments likewise indicated that he understood he was free to go and was not under arrest. See, e.g., Audio at 9:00–02 (Agent Fitzgerald: “I can’t force you to talk to us.” Martinez: “Right.”).

The interview, of course, was not entirely enjoyable for Martinez, who, after all, had just been informed that his house was being searched for child pornography. He repeatedly expressed sadness that he would lose his police job and wished he could just go back and “work [his] shift.” He was also concerned about the inevitable embarrassment that would accompany child- pornography charges—asking repeatedly which of his coworkers knew about the investigation and pleading for the agents to keep him off the local news. Martinez allowed one of the agents to look through his cell phone during the interview but refused to share his computer password so that the agents at his house could easily unlock his computer.

After concluding the interview, one of the agents went to another room and called the federal prosecutor assigned to the case, who instructed him to arrest Martinez. The agent returned to the conference room and told Martinez he would be arrested after all, but the agents allowed him to use the restroom and make phone calls before handcuffing him.

A grand jury indicted Martinez for receiving, possessing, and distributing child pornography, all in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(2). Martinez moved to suppress the statements he had made during the interview, arguing that he had been in custody for Miranda

purposes but had not been given Miranda warnings. After an evidentiary hearing, the district court agreed and suppressed the evidence. The government appealed.

II.

We review the district court’s factual findings for clear error. United States v. Bailey, 302 F.3d 652, 656 (6th Cir. 2002). “A factual finding is clearly erroneous when the reviewing court is left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made.” United States v. Smith, 263 F.3d 571, 581 (6th Cir. 2001) (citing United States v. Ayen, 997 F.2d 1150, 1152 (6th Cir. 1993)). Because Martinez prevailed below, we also draw all reasonable factual inferences in his favor. United States v. Panak, 552 F.3d 462, 465 (6th Cir. 2009). But the bottom-line question—whether Martinez was “in custody” during the interview—is a mixed question of law and fact that we review de novo. United States v. Levenderis, 806 F.3d 390, 399 (6th Cir. 2015) (citing United States v. Salvo, 133 F.3d 943, 948 (6th Cir. 1998)).

If a suspect is in police custody, officers must clearly inform him of his Miranda rights before questioning him. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 444–45 (1966). If they do not, they may not use the resulting evidence in a subsequent prosecution. Id. at 444. A person may be “in custody” while not actually under arrest. “‘[C]ustody’ is a term of art that specifies circumstances that are thought generally to present a serious danger of coercion.” Howes v. Fields, 565 U.S. 499, 508–09 (2012). “In determining whether a person is in custody in this sense, the initial step is to ascertain whether, in light of ‘the objective circumstances of the interrogation,’ a ‘reasonable person [would] have felt he or she was not at liberty to terminate the interrogation and leave.’” Id. at 509 (alteration in original) (quoting Stansbury v. California, 511 U.S. 318, 322–23, 325 (1994) (per curiam), and Thompson v. Keohane, 516 U.S. 99, 112 (1995)). To determine “how a suspect would have ‘gauge[d]’ his ‘freedom of movement,’ courts must examine ‘all of the circumstances

surrounding the interrogation.’” Id. (alteration in original) (quoting Stansbury, 511 U.S. at 322, 325).

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