United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 08-1787
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Appellee,
v.
MAURICE J. FAGAN,
Defendant, Appellant.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Rya W. Zobel, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Boudin, Selya and Dyk,* Circuit Judges.
Ryan M. Schiff, with whom Salsberg & Schneider was on brief,
for appellant.
F. Thompson Reece, Special Assistant United States Attorney,
with whom Michael J. Sullivan, United States Attorney, Anthony E.
Fuller and George W. Vien, Assistant United Attorneys, were on
brief, for appellee.
August 13, 2009
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*Of the Federal Circuit, sitting by designation.
SELYA, Circuit Judge. The Warrant Clause of the Fourth
Amendment has been interpreted to permit searches not only of the
premises specified in a warrant but also of structures
"appurtenant" to those premises. The case law, however, provides
very little guidance as to how courts should determine whether or
not a given structure is appurtenant to described premises. This
case offers us an opportunity to shed some light on this shadowy
corner of Fourth Amendment law.
The matter comes to us in the form of an appeal of the
denial of a motion to suppress evidence seized from a storage
closet by local law enforcement officers armed with a search
warrant for the neighboring apartment. The district court ruled
that the closet, although not itself within the apartment or
separately specified in the warrant, was appurtenant to the
apartment and, therefore, validly searched. United States v.
Fagan, No. 06-10023, 2006 WL 3210060, at *5 (D. Mass. Oct. 26,
2006). Discerning no error, we affirm.
I. BACKGROUND
We rehearse the facts as found by the district court,
consistent with record support. See United States v. Lee, 317 F.3d
26, 30 (1st Cir. 2003). We supplement them with additional facts
not disputed by the parties.
On October 20, 2005, local police officers executed a
search warrant at 11 Battles Street, a three-story tenement in
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Brockton, Massachusetts. The warrant authorized a search of the
third-floor apartment and cellar.
When the officers entered the apartment, three people
tried to flee. The officers detained them. In a bedroom, the
officers found defendant-appellant Maurice J. ("Jimmy") Fagan and
his thirteen-year-old daughter. In that bedroom, officers found,
among other things, a loaded handgun and a key to a padlock. A
search of the defendant's pockets revealed a small plastic bag
containing 3.14 grams of crack cocaine and roughly $358 in cash.
The officers found more drugs in the living room, pantry, and rear
hallway.
The police noticed a closet on the third-floor landing of
11 Battles Street. The landing itself is approximately six feet by
twelve feet. The closet's door is about eight feet from the front
door to the third-floor apartment. Using the key that they had
found in the bedroom, the officers opened the padlock that secured
the closet door. Inside, they found two digital scales, "wampum
cards" from Foxwoods Resort Casino, and paperwork from the
Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV). The wampum cards
and RMV paperwork bore the defendant's name.
In due season, a federal grand jury indicted the
defendant on one count of possession of crack cocaine with intent
to distribute, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), and one count
of being a felon in possession of ammunition, in violation of 18
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U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). The defendant moved to suppress the evidence
seized from the storage closet, arguing that the warrant limited
the search to the third-floor apartment and cellar, and did not
include the closet on the landing outside the apartment.
Following an evidentiary hearing, the district court
denied the motion. It concluded that the closet was appurtenant to
the apartment and, therefore, validly searched under the purview of
the warrant. Fagan, 2006 WL 3210060, at *5.
A trial ensued. The jury convicted the defendant on both
counts charged in the indictment. The court sentenced him to a
210-month incarcerative term. This timely appeal followed. In it,
the defendant challenges only the denial of his pretrial motion to
suppress the evidence seized from the storage closet.
II. ANALYSIS
We employ a bifurcated approach in assaying the denial of
a motion to suppress. In carrying out that approach, we assess
factual findings for clear error and evaluate legal rulings de
novo. See Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 699 (1996);
United States v. Coplin, 463 F.3d 96, 100 (1st Cir. 2006).
Applying this binary standard, we review the district court's
conclusion that the search of the closet did not exceed the scope
of the warrant de novo. See United States v. Rogers, 521 F.3d 5,
9 (1st Cir. 2008).
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The Fourth Amendment states in pertinent part that no
search warrant shall issue unless it "particularly describ[es] the
place to be searched, and the . . . things to be seized." U.S.
Const. amend. IV. The authority to search conferred by a warrant
is circumscribed by the particular places delineated in the warrant
and does not extend to other or different places. United States v.
Bonner, 808 F.2d 864, 868 (1st Cir. 1986). But search warrants are
not always self-elucidating and, in all events, search warrants
must be read in a practical, common-sense manner. See United
States v. Ferreras, 192 F.3d 5, 9-10 (1st Cir. 1999) (admonishing
that "hypertechnical readings" of search warrants "should be
avoided"). It follows that search warrants should be viewed
through a real-world prism and interpreted in a "realistic
fashion." United States v. Principe, 499 F.2d 1135, 1137 (1st Cir.
1974) (quoting United States v. Ventresca, 280 U.S. 102, 108
(1965)).
It is clear that structures that are part of the premises
specified in a search warrant may validly be searched under the
purview of the warrant. See, e.g., Ferreras, 192 F.3d at 9-10
(affirming denial of motion to suppress evidence found in an attic
when search warrant specified only the second-floor apartment
because the attic was found to be a part of the apartment).
Similarly, structures not explicitly mentioned in a warrant but
that reasonably can be viewed as a part of the described premises
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have been held validly searched under the purview of the warrant.
See, e.g., United States v. Heldt, 668 F.2d 1238, 1265 (D.C. Cir.
1981). So, too, structures have been deemed appurtenant to the
premises specified in a search warrant, though not physically a
part of those premises, and have been held validly searched under
the purview of the warrant. See, e.g., Principe, 499 F.2d at 1137
(affirming refusal to suppress evidence seized from "appurtenant"
cabinet located immediately outside the apartment specified in the
warrant).
This case involves the third of these scenarios: an
allegedly appurtenant structure.1 In that circumstance, we think
that the standard to be applied is one of objective reasonableness.
So long as the officers executing the warrant have an objectively
reasonable basis, in light of the known characteristics of the
location and the evidence at hand, for concluding that a structure
is appurtenant to the premises specified in the search warrant, that
structure may validly be searched under the purview of the warrant.
See id. (noting that "officers could reasonably suppose, given the
second floor layout and its proximity to the apartment, that the
cabinet was appurtenant to the apartment, as in fact it was").
1
Although the case law seems to have developed along these
three avenues, it is at least arguable that the same doctrine
encompasses all of them. Analysis of this proposition is, however,
beyond the scope of this opinion.
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In this context, we refer to appurtenancy in its
conventional sense. A typical dictionary definition of
"appurtenant" indicates that it means "[b]elonging as a property or
legal right (to); spec. in Law, constituting a property or right
subsidiary to one which is more important." Oxford English
Dictionary 590 (2d ed. 1989). Structures that have been found to
be appurtenant to described residential premises include such things
as storage closets, see United States v. McCaster, 193 F.3d 930, 933
(8th Cir. 1999); cabinets, see Principe, 499 F.2d at 1137; storage
rooms and bins, see United States v. Ware, 890 F.2d 1008, 1011 (8th
Cir. 1989); lockers, see State v. Llamas-Villa, 836 P.2d 239, 242
(Wash. Ct. App. 1992); mailboxes, see People v. Weagley, 267 Cal.
Rptr. 85, 87 (Cal. Ct. App. 1990); and birdhouses, see United States
v. Asselin, 775 F.2d 445, 446-47 (1st Cir. 1985).
Whether a searching officer reasonably could conclude that
a specific structure is appurtenant to the premises specified in a
particular search warrant necessarily demands close attention to the
facts incident to the search in question. Each instance is likely
to be sui generis, but the case law depicts some helpful guideposts.
These include the proximity of the structure to the described
premises, see Ware, 890 F.2d at 1011 (holding that a storage room
next to an apartment was "near enough to alert the searching
officers that it was an appurtenance of the apartment"); the
location's layout and the context-specific relationship between the
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structure and the premises specified in the warrant, see Principe,
499 F.2d at 1137; and extrinsic evidence, including evidence
discovered during admittedly valid portions of the search,
suggesting that the structure is appurtenant to the premises
specified in the warrant, see Ware, 890 F.2d at 1011 (observing that
the defendant's key ring included keys to a storage room deemed
appurtenant to the premises specified in the warrant).
In the case at hand, all of these guideposts point toward
the conclusion that the district court reached. The third-floor
closet was located on the third-floor landing, no more than eight
feet from the front door of the apartment; the landing itself was
small and led to the apartment; the spatial relationship between the
closet and the apartment was intimate; the other residential units
in the building were physically removed from both the third floor
and the third-floor landing; and the key found in the defendant's
bedroom opened the padlock that secured the closet. Thus, evidence
found in the flat quite literally opened the door to the closet.
That combination of factors was sufficient to permit an objectively
reasonable officer to conclude that the storage closet was
appurtenant to the apartment and to search the closet under the
purview of the warrant.
In an effort to blunt the force of this reasoning, the
defendant asserts that such a holding is unwarranted because here,
unlike in Principe, there was no confirmation from the landlord that
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use of the storage closet was a concomitant of renting the
apartment. Accordingly, the defendant's thesis runs, the lack of
clarity about whether tenants other than the defendant were entitled
to use the closet should have precluded the search.
This thesis is unpersuasive. Each case must stand or fall
on its own facts, and a landlord's verification is not a sine qua
non to a finding of appurtenancy. See, e.g., Asselin, 775 F.2d at
446-47; Weagley, 267 Cal. Rptr. at 87. What counts is whether the
searching officer has an objectively reasonable basis for believing
that a particular structure is appurtenant to the premises specified
in the search warrant. If he does, he may search that structure
under the purview of the warrant; he need not halt his search to
scrutinize lease arrangements, interrogate landlords, or interview
other occupants of the building.
The short of it is that a police officer sometimes can
make an objectively reasonable determination of appurtenancy through
a common-sense evaluation of information contained in the warrant,
the layout, and evidence encountered at the scene. This is such a
case: the proximity of the storage closet to the apartment, its
relative isolation from the other residential units in the multi-
family building, the fact that a key discovered in the apartment
opened the closet, and the utter absence of any countervailing
information were enough to ground an objectively reasonable
conclusion that the closet was appurtenant to the apartment. See,
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e.g., McCaster, 193 F.3d at 933 ("[T]he close proximity of the area
to McCaster's living quarters and its enclosure within the duplex
unit supports the finding that it was reasonable for the officers
to believe that the area fell within the scope of the warrant.").
III. CONCLUSION
We need go no further. For the reasons elucidated above,
we hold that the district court did not err in denying the
defendant's motion to suppress.
Affirmed.
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