IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
No. 14-1746
Filed February 24, 2016
STATE OF IOWA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
vs.
NATHAN JAMES ERICSON,
Defendant-Appellant.
________________________________________________________________
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Woodbury County, James D. Scott
(motion) and Steven J. Andreasen (trial), Judges.
A defendant appeals the denial of his motion to suppress. AFFIRMED.
Robert B. Brock II of Law Office of Robert B. Brock II, P.C., Le Mars, for
appellant.
Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, and Kevin Cmelik and Louis S.
Sloven, Assistant Attorneys General, for appellee.
Considered by Potterfield, P.J., and Doyle and Tabor, JJ. Scott, S.J.,
takes no part.
2
TABOR, Judge.
Nathan Ericson challenges his conviction for possession of
methamphetamine. He contends the district court should have suppressed the
drugs discovered by a state trooper during a pat down and plain-feel search.
Because the district court properly relied on the doctrine of inevitable discovery to
uphold the search, we affirm Ericson’s conviction.
I. Background Facts and Proceedings
Ericson was a backseat passenger in a Cadillac stopped for excessive
window tint on Interstate 29 in the afternoon of December 21, 2013. Iowa State
Trooper Chad Schweitzberger discovered the driver did not have a valid license.
The trooper asked the two passengers for identification. Trooper Schweitzberger
learned Ericson’s driver’s license was revoked for drug-related charges and he
“appeared to have a warrant for his arrest through Plymouth County.” Trooper
Schweitzberger then contacted dispatch to confirm Ericson’s warrant was still
pending. The trooper recalled Ericson did not make eye contact and his arms
had been “moving around the back seat.”
Responding to a request for backup, Trooper Chris Barber asked Ericson
to step out of the car and placed him in handcuffs. The trooper believed Ericson
was under the influence of a drug or alcohol because he was “lethargic in his
mannerisms” and his speech was slurred. Trooper Barber performed a pat
down. Trooper Barber “felt an unusually shaped, kind of round lump” in Ericson’s
left front pocket. The trooper described the object as hard and estimated its size
as “about a half inch or so in diameter.” Trooper Barber removed the object from
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Ericson’s pocket and saw that it looked like methamphetamine.1 The troopers
placed Ericson under arrest for possession of methamphetamine. Following the
discovery, the troopers received confirmation from dispatch that Ericson’s arrest
warrant was still outstanding.
On January 14, 2014, the State filed a trial information charging Ericson
with possession of methamphetamine, in violation of Iowa Code section
124.401(5) (2013), and as a habitual offender under section 902.8.
Ericson filed a motion to suppress the drugs arguing Trooper Barber
lacked probable cause to search the pocket and the search went “beyond what is
necessary to determine if the suspect is armed” as permitted by Minnesota v.
Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366, 367 (1993). The State resisted. Following a hearing,
the district court denied Ericson’s motion.
The district court held the evidence was admissible under the plain-feel
exception to the warrant requirement. The court found Trooper Barber was
justified in patting Ericson down for safety reasons. The court also noted “the
trooper believed the item could be a weapon component or drugs given the
circumstances, and because he did not manipulate the item and conduct a
further search unauthorized by Terry, the subsequent search of Defendant’s
pocket is lawful.” The court also ruled the evidence was admissible under the
inevitable-discovery doctrine as the drugs would have been found in a search
incident to arrest following the confirmation of Ericson’s outstanding arrest
warrant.
1
A field test later confirmed it was methamphetamine.
4
Ericson waived his right to a jury trial and stipulated to a trial on the
minutes of testimony. The court convicted Ericson of methamphetamine
possession with the habitual-offender enhancement. The court sentenced him to
an indeterminate term of incarceration not to exceed fifteen years with a three-
year mandatory minimum term. Ericson now appeals.
II. Standard of Review
Because Ericson raises a Fourth Amendment issue,2 we review de novo
the totality of the circumstances as shown by the entire record. See State v.
Naujoks, 637 N.W.2d 101, 106 (Iowa 2001).
III. Analysis
The trooper’s warrantless search of Ericson’s pocket is per se
unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment unless the State can establish an
exception to the warrant requirement. See id. at 107. The State offered two
justifications for the search at the suppression hearing: plain feel and inevitable
discovery.
The plain-feel exception is of relatively recent origin. In 1993 the United
States Supreme Court recognized a parallel to the plain-view doctrine for “tactile
discoveries of contraband.” See Dickerson, 508 U.S. at 375. The Dickerson
court described the exception as follows: “If a police officer lawfully pats down a
suspect’s outer clothing and feels an object whose contour or mass makes its
identity immediately apparent, there has been no invasion of the suspect’s
privacy beyond that already authorized by the officer’s search for weapons.” Id.
2
Ericson does not invoke article I, section 8 of the Iowa Constitution.
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Ericson argues it was not “immediately apparent” to the trooper the “lump”
in Ericson’s pocket was contraband other than a weapon. Trooper Barber
testified he believed the object was “either drugs or maybe a component of a
weapon, like a bullet or something like that.” The State contends the plain-feel
exception does not demand “absolute certainty” from an officer, only “probable
cause to believe the item is contraband.” See id. at 376.
While absolute certainty may not be required, an item’s incriminating
nature is not “immediately apparent” if an officer is torn between multiple-choice
options. See Commonwealth v. Crowder, 884 S.W.2d 649, 652 (Ky. 1994)
(concluding search was unconstitutional when officer testified item “felt like a
small gumball” and “may have been a bindle of drugs”). We agree with Ericson
that the search of his pocket was not justified under the plain-feel exception.
Having found the trooper overstepped constitutional bounds in seizing the
methamphetamine from Ericson’s pocket, the next question is whether the State
can avoid the exclusionary rule through the doctrine of inevitable discovery.
Inevitable discovery is “an extrapolation from the independent source doctrine:
Since the tainted evidence would be admissible if in fact discovered through an
independent source, it should be admissible if it inevitably would have been
discovered.” Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533, 539 (1988). The doctrine
applies when “relevant, probative evidence gathered despite Fourth Amendment
violations is not constitutionally excluded when the police would have inevitably
discovered the same evidence acting properly.” See State v. Christianson, 627
N.W.2d 910, 912 (Iowa 2001); see also State v. Seager, 571 N.W.2d 204, 211
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(Iowa 1997). The doctrine recognizes society has an interest in deterring
unlawful police conduct but also has an interest in having the fact finder receive
all probative evidence of a crime. Christianson, 627 N.W.2d at 912. The proper
balance between these interests is achieved by “putting the police in the same,
not a worse, position [than] they would have been in if no police error or
misconduct had occurred.” Id. (quoting Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 443
(1984)).
Here, the troopers received initial information that Ericson had an
outstanding warrant for his arrest before Trooper Barber conducted the pat down
for weapons and plain-feel search. Trooper Schweitzberger had contacted
dispatch for confirmation of the outstanding warrant. Shortly after Trooper
Barber discovered the methamphetamine, dispatch responded to Trooper
Schweitzberger that Ericson’s arrest warrant was still outstanding. Trooper
Schweitzberger testified he and Trooper Barber would have arrested Ericson
based on the outstanding warrant and would have searched him incident to
arrest and before booking him at the jail.3
Search incident to arrest is another recognized exception to the warrant
requirement. State v. Gaskins, 866 N.W.2d 1, 8 (Iowa 2015) (explaining this
exception “derives from interests in officer safety and evidence preservation that
are typically implicated in arrest situations”). Because the troopers inevitably and
actually in short order, would have searched Ericson incident to executing the
valid arrest warrant and would have obtained the methamphetamine through
3
The officers took Ericson to the hospital for medical attention rather than directly to jail.
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lawful means, the exclusionary rule does not apply. Cf. State v. Rowland, 352
P.3d 506, 510 (Idaho Ct. App. 2015) (holding defendant “would certainly have
been arrested as a result of the contraband found pursuant to the valid search
warrant and then searched incident to that arrest, making the discovery of the
methamphetamine in his pocket inevitable.”).
Relying on Christianson, Ericson argues “the later discovery that the
Plymouth County warrant was valid, and the troopers’ testimony that Ericson
would have been arrested anyway, cannot retroactively create reasonable
grounds for the troopers to believe that the ‘unusually shaped lump’ in Ericson’s
pocket was contraband.” See Christianson, 627 N.W.2d at 912-13 (holding
“existence of reasonable grounds is a condition precedent to imposition of
implied consent” under chapter 321J). Ericson’s reliance is misplaced. The
inevitable-discovery analysis in Christianson was cabined to reasonable grounds
for implied consent; it does not pertain here. As the State argues, the inevitable-
discovery doctrine does not “help prove Trooper Barber’s action was proper;
rather it allows the State to argue this particular evidence would have been
obtained even if Trooper Barber had not reached into the defendant’s pocket at
that point in the evening.”
Ericson does not contest the inevitability of his arrest upon confirmation of
the outstanding warrant from dispatch. He does not argue the troopers would not
have found the drugs during a valid search incident to his arrest under that
warrant. On this record, employing the exclusionary rule to suppress the
methamphetamine would put the troopers in a worse position than they would
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have been absent the improper plain-feel search, thereby failing to achieve the
balance described in Nix. Accordingly, we uphold the suppression ruling on the
basis of inevitable discovery. Ericson’s conviction remains in place.
AFFIRMED.
State of Iowa v. Nathan James Ericson
Combined Opinion