United States v. Esquivel-Rios , 786 F.3d 1299 ( 2015 )

FILED
United States Court of Appeals
Tenth Circuit
PUBLISH May 27, 2015
Elisabeth A. Shumaker
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Clerk of Court
TENTH CIRCUIT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff - Appellee,
No. 14-3162
v.
ANTONIO ESQUIVEL-RIOS,
Defendant - Appellant.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS
(D.C. No. 5:10-CR-40060-JAR-1)
Michael M. Jackson, Topeka, Kansas, for Defendant - Appellant.
James A. Brown, Assistant United States Attorney (and Barry R. Grissom, United
States Attorney, with him on the brief), Topeka, Kansas, for Plaintiff - Appellee.
Before BRISCOE, Chief Circuit Judge, SEYMOUR, and KELLY, Circuit
Judges.
KELLY, Circuit Judge.
Defendant-Appellant Antonio Esquivel-Rios appeals from the district
court’s order denying his motion to suppress evidence. In Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s
first direct appeal, we concluded that the record lacked the quantity and quality of
information necessary for us to determine whether Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s Fourth
Amendment rights had been violated. United States v. Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d
1231, 1236–39 (10th Cir. 2013). We remanded to allow the district court to
reconsider its Fourth Amendment ruling in light of our discussion. With the
benefit of additional evidence and briefing, the district court concluded that Mr.
Esquivel-Rios’s Fourth Amendment rights had indeed been violated but that
suppression was not appropriate given the lack of police culpability. United
States v. Esquivel-Rios, 39 F. Supp. 3d 1175 (D. Kan. 2014). Accordingly, the
district court denied Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s motion to suppress for a second time.
Exercising jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we affirm.
Background
We presented the facts giving rise to this criminal prosecution in the prior
appeal:
Our case began when Kansas Trooper Andrew Dean, a regular before
this court, sat watching traffic along I-70. At some point, a minivan
caught his eye. There was nothing special about the minivan except
maybe the fact it bore a Colorado temporary 30-day registration tag.
But even that didn’t suggest anything amiss: the tag looked genuine
enough, it was displayed in the right place, its expiration date hadn’t
yet passed. All the same, Trooper Dean decided to verify the tag
with a law enforcement database. He called in the tag number to a
dispatcher who soon replied “that’s a negatory on record, not
returning.” Because of—and only because of—the dispatcher’s “no
return” report, Trooper Dean turned on his lights and stopped the
minivan. After a brief discussion, the trooper sought and received
permission to conduct a search, one that eventually yielded a secret
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compartment containing over a pound of methamphetamine.
Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at 1234–35.
During the initial proceedings before the district court, Mr. Esquivel-Rios
sought to suppress all evidence obtained as a result of the vehicle search. He
argued that the traffic stop violated his Fourth Amendment rights because the
trooper lacked reasonable suspicion of any criminal wrongdoing. Because the
trooper stopped him solely because of the database’s “no return” report, Mr.
Esquivel-Rios argued, he lacked particularized and objective information to
establish reasonable suspicion.
The district court disagreed, however, and denied Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s
motion to suppress. It concluded that the dispatcher’s report, which indicated that
no information could be obtained regarding the vehicle’s registration, gave the
trooper reason to suspect criminal activity. Later, Mr. Esquivel-Rios was found
guilty of possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute, 21 U.S.C.
§ 841(a)(1). Asserting various grounds for relief, Mr. Esquivel-Rios challenged
his conviction in this court.
Much of this court’s first opinion was devoted to a single issue raised by
Mr. Esquivel-Rios on appeal: the interplay between database reliability and the
existence of reasonable suspicion. We began by noting that the district court’s
reasonable suspicion determination was supported, at least superficially, by our
Fourth Amendment cases. “This court and others have regularly upheld traffic
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stops based on information that the defendant’s vehicle’s registration failed to
appear in a law enforcement database . . . .” Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at 1235
(citing United States v. Cortez-Galaviz, 495 F.3d 1203, 1205–06 (10th Cir. 2007);
United States v. Garcia-Ballesteros, 74 F.3d 1250, 1996 WL 3920, at *1 (10th
Cir. 1996) (unpublished table decision)). The logic of those traffic stop cases is
quite simple. Most, if not all, states have laws requiring motor vehicle owners
and operators to register their vehicles with a state agency before operating those
vehicles on public roads. The state agency then maintains the registration
information in a database, which is often accessible to law enforcement. Thus,
“[w]hen a law enforcement database yields no information about a registration
tag, . . . that raises a non-trivial possibility the tag wasn’t lawfully issued in the
first place but falsified in some way.” Id. That non-trivial possibility, we have
held, can amount to reasonable suspicion.
We also concluded in the first appeal that those cases were not dispositive
of Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s Fourth Amendment challenge. The presence of an
additional, complicating fact that we had not before contemplated made Mr.
Esquivel-Rios’s case worthy of deeper consideration. See id. (“This court and
others have regularly upheld traffic stops based on information that the
defendant’s vehicle’s registration failed to appear in a law enforcement
database—at least when the record suggested no reason to worry about the
database’s reliability.”) (emphasis added). Here, there was evidence “suggesting
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that the database on which the officer relied to justify his stop might bear a real
problem—a problem that might mean a ‘no return’ doesn’t suggest criminal
conduct but only some bureaucratic snafu.” Id. After dispatcher Derek Lathan
informed the trooper that the temporary tag at issue was “negatory on the record,
not returning,” the trooper acknowledged the report, but then sought clarification.
He asked, “Was that not on file or just no return?” Lathan responded, “Colorado
temp tags usually don’t return.” 4 R. 3. This string of communications, including
Lathan’s critical statement that Colorado temporary tags “usually don’t return,”
transpired before the stop was initiated.
We had previously left open the possibility that a demonstration of database
unreliability “might well form a persuasive basis for a suppression motion,”
Cortez-Galaviz, 495 F.3d at 1209, and thus found significant that the record here
might support such a demonstration. We concluded that the district court’s
decision to deny Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s motion for suppression was problematic in
light of this evidence, primarily for two reasons.
Our primary concern was that the record did not provide much information
about the database on which the trooper relied. Instead, we knew only that the
“no return” report served as the sole justification for the traffic stop. Without
more information bearing on the database’s reliability, we said it would be
difficult (if not impossible) to determine whether this single report could
constitute particularized evidence of criminal activity. Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at
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1236. Most important, we emphasized how the reliability question informs the
overall reasonable suspicion analysis. Using a hypothetical example to
demonstrate this point, we imagined a circumstance where a “no return” report
was more likely to indicate innocuous behavior than criminal activity—for
example, where “officials systematically decline to place information about
Colorado temporary tags into the database because of their fleeting 30-day life
span.” Id. Under those circumstances, we expressed doubt that a “no return”
report, without more, could support a finding of reasonable suspicion. We stated:
So if legitimate Colorado temporary tags are almost never placed in
the database and if forged temporary tags account for an even smaller
percentage of the population of temporary tags—both plausible
possibilities—getting a “no return” result may tell a reasonable
officer next to nothing: virtually every query would yield the same
“no return” message whether the tag is legitimate or not. And it is
hard to imagine how a “no return” report in those circumstances
could form a “particularized” basis to suspect wrongdoing. What
goes into the database will much affect the reasonableness of a
search relying on it: garbage in, garbage out.
Id. at 1237.
We further expressed concern that the district court “failed to engage with
evidence seeming to call the database into question.” Id. at 1238. In our view,
the district court erred by “treat[ing] this case as just another one where the
database wasn’t challenged.” Id. at 1237. We noted that the district court’s
orders denying Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s motions to suppress and for a new trial
seemingly overlooked the significance of Lathan’s comment that Colorado
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temporary tags “usually don’t return.” In addition, we noted that the district
court’s conclusion rested, at least in part, on misconstrued aspects of the trooper’s
testimony. Id. at 1238.
There were simply too many unanswered questions and too many record
ambiguities concerning the database reliability issue for the district court to
conclude that no Fourth Amendment violation had occurred. We therefore
remanded for further proceedings. In the interests of judicial economy, we
recommended that the district court consider not only the Fourth Amendment
question but also the question of remedy. Id. at 1239.
On remand, the district court conducted an evidentiary hearing, where it
heard testimony from Trooper Dean, dispatcher Lathan, Colorado Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) employee Sydney Profancik, and Colorado Department of
Motor Vehicles (CDMV) investigator James Kautz. In addition, the court
received documentary evidence in the form of written responses from both CBI
and the Colorado Department of Revenue (CDOR or Department of Revenue).
Esquivel-Rios, 39 F. Supp. 3d at 1179. The following was established through
the testimony and exhibits adduced at the evidentiary hearing.
At the time Mr. Esquivel-Rios was pulled over in 2010, Colorado
temporary tag information was not available in the Colorado Crime Information
Center (CCIC), the database designated to interface with state and federal law
enforcement agencies. At that time, all Colorado temporary tag information was
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maintained by the Department of Revenue. The CCIC database, however, was not
maintained by either CDOR or CDMV; rather, it was maintained by CBI, and CBI
did not receive temporary tag information from CDOR in 2010. 3 R. 539–40,
559. Thus, due to this lack of information-sharing, a CCIC query for Colorado
temporary tag information in 2010 would have been futile. Id. at 540, 564. The
only way to obtain this information, witnesses testified, was by placing a phone
call or sending an administrative message to CDOR. Id. at 540, 561. It was only
in 2012, long after Mr. Esquivel-Rios had been arrested and charged, did this
practice change. By the spring or early summer of 2012, the CCIC database was
loaded with temporary tag information provided by CDOR, id. at 559; see id. at
540; even then, the temporary tag information loaded into the database pertained
only to tags issued in December 2011 or later. 4 R. 7–8.
The testimony at the evidentiary hearing established that a CCIC query for
a vehicle’s registration information can yield one of three results: (1) the
requested information is produced; (2) no record / not on file; or (3) an error
report resulting from “invalid information.” Id. at 545. A database query in 2010
for a Colorado temporary tag would have yielded the second possibility, “not on
file,” which indicated that the relevant information “has not been put into the
system yet, or . . . there is no record available for that tag.” Id. at 546. “No
return,” which was Lathan’s report to the trooper, is not one of the possible
results. Id. at 547, 566. Notably, the database provides no warning or
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notification to end-users that it does not contain the requested information—it
simply provides a “not on file” response. Id. at 540–41, 552.
After the trooper radioed in his request to dispatch, Lathan queried his
computer system for the vehicle’s registration and VIN. His system reported, as
to both the registration and the VIN, that the information was “not on file” based
on a “response from DMV.” 4 R. 52–53. With these results, Lathan reported
back to the trooper that the information was “negatory on the record, not
returning.” Although Lathan reported to the trooper that the information was not
returning, both Lathan and the trooper testified that “not on file” and “not
returning” were functional equivalents—neither would allow an officer to verify a
vehicle’s registration status. 3 R. 573, 597–98, 601.
Lathan and the trooper testified that they had never been specifically
advised, through training or otherwise, that Colorado’s database lacked
registration information for temporary tags. Id. at 570, 584, 601, 608. In general,
this is something law enforcement personnel would have learned only through
experience. Id. at 561–62. In Lathan’s experience, electronic queries for
Colorado temporary tags were unsuccessful; thus, he testified that, when he ran
this particular query, he suspected it would not produce the requested
information. Id. at 571–72. The trooper testified, however, that at the time he
conducted the stop, he did not believe the database was unreliable. Id. at 602,
608, 617. While he recalled a number of occasions where information pertaining
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to temporary tags was not available, he did not believe such information was
categorically unavailable. Id. at 601–02, 608, 621. To the contrary, the trooper
testified that he thought registration information for Colorado temporary tags had
previously been available upon request. Id. at 602.
According to the trooper’s testimony, it is part of his agency’s mission to
determine whether vehicles traveling on Kansas roads were validly registered,
which, in turn, requires him to investigate potential automobile thefts and forged
or altered registrations. Id. at 599–601. He testified that Lathan’s report raised
his suspicions in light of his investigatory experience, and that he believed he
could only determine whether the vehicle was validly registered by conducting a
traffic stop. Id. at 599. This was something the trooper had done on numerous
prior occasions. Id. at 602–03.
Because the CCIC database did not contain any Colorado temporary tag
information in 2010, the database’s report told “a reasonable officer next to
nothing” about the legality of the vehicle’s operation. Esquivel-Rios, 725 F.3d at
1237. Thus, hewing closely to this court’s guidance from the first direct appeal,
the district court found that it had “no choice but to conclude that the ‘negatory
on record, not returning’ report . . . did not qualify as particularized evidence that
the vehicle was not properly registered.” Esquivel-Rios, 39 F. Supp. 3d at 1185.
The district court therefore found that the trooper’s traffic stop violated the
Fourth Amendment. Despite the constitutional violation, however, the district
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court found that no basis existed to apply the exclusionary rule. In the court’s
view, “the evidence show[ed] that Trooper Dean reasonably, but mistakenly
believed that the report from dispatch indicated that criminal activity might be
afoot, and that he had reasonable suspicion to stop Defendant’s vehicle.” Id. at
1188. Additionally, the court found no evidence to support Mr. Esquivel-Rios’s
argument that CBI’s maintenance of the CCIC database amounted to “systemic
negligence,” warranting exclusion. Finding no police culpability or systemic
negligence to deter, the district court concluded that “the benefits of deterrence in
this case do not outweigh its heavy cost.” Id. at 1189.
Discussion
On appeal, the government has abandoned any argument that the “no
return” report constituted particularized and objective evidence sufficient to
support a finding of reasonable suspicion. Instead, the government contends that
the trooper’s reasonable but mistaken beliefs were constitutionally sufficient to
furnish grounds for an investigatory detention. 1 Aplee. Br. 22–23, 31. In the
1
We note that the government’s position on appeal varies somewhat from
what it argued in the district court. After the remand hearing, the government
argued that reasonable suspicion existed because CDOR maintained a database of
temporary tags and therefore the “not on file” response raised reasonable
suspicion of criminal activity. 1 R. 285. This theory was rejected by the district
court. Esquivel-Rios, 39 F. Supp. 3d at 1184–85.
As part of its good faith argument, however, the government contended that
Trooper Dean could have reasonably, but mistakenly, believed that the “not on
file” response furnished reasonable suspicion. 1 R. 287–88 (citing United States
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alternative, the government contends that even if a Fourth Amendment violation
did occur, the exclusionary rule should not apply because there is no police
misconduct to deter. It contends that the deterrence rationale is further undercut
in this case because any alleged systemic negligence has been remedied—the
Colorado database now contains registration information for temporary tags. We
agree that exclusion is not an appropriate remedy and, therefore, decline to
address the government’s “reasonable but mistaken” belief argument.
A. The Exclusionary Rule and the Good Faith Exception
The exclusionary rule bars the prosecution from using, in its case-in-chief,
evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Herring v. United
States, 555 U.S. 135, 139 (2009). Whether the rule applies in any given case,
however, is context-dependent. In other words, “suppression is not an automatic
consequence of a Fourth Amendment violation.” Id. at 137; Hudson v. Michigan,
547 U.S. 586, 591 (2006).
v. Shareef, 100 F.3d 1491, 1505 (10th Cir. 1996)). The district court adopted part
of this argument in portions of its remedy discussion, noting the trooper’s lack of
culpability. Esquivel-Rios, 39 F. Supp. 3d at 1186. Now, the government has
advanced the “reasonable but mistaken belief” argument in support of the
threshold question—whether the Fourth Amendment was violated in the first
instance—rather than in support of the remedial question.
Of course, application of the exclusionary rule is “an issue separate from
the question whether the Fourth Amendment rights of the party seeking to invoke
the rule were violated by police conduct.” Arizona v. Evans, 514 U.S. 1, 10
(1995) (citations omitted). We question whether the government adequately
preserved its argument that a reasonable but mistaken belief furnishes reasonable
suspicion in this case.
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Our analysis is guided by several well-established principles. First, the
primary object of the exclusionary rule is deterring future Fourth Amendment
violations. Evans, 514 U.S. at 10; United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 908–10
(1984). The Court has stated that suppression is justified only if it will result in
“appreciable deterrence.” United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. 433, 454 (1976).
Second, “if exclusion of evidence . . . is to have any deterrent effect . . . it
must alter the behavior of individual law enforcement officers or the policies of
their departments.” Leon, 468 U.S. at 918. Thus, determining whether exclusion
will further the deterrence rationale requires an assessment of the police
misconduct. Id. at 911; see also Evans, 514 U.S. at 14–16. Traditionally,
exclusion was reserved for willful violations of Fourth Amendment rights. Leon,
468 U.S. at 919 (“If the purpose of the exclusionary rule is to deter unlawful
police conduct, then evidence . . . should be suppressed only if it can be said that
the law enforcement officer had knowledge, or may properly be charged with
knowledge, that the search was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.”)
(quoting United States v. Peltier, 422 U.S. 531, 542 (1975)). In Leon, the Court
held that the exclusionary rule does not apply in cases where “the offending
officers acted in the objectively reasonable belief that their conduct did not
violate the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 918. Adopting the so-called “good faith
exception” to the exclusionary rule, the Court found that exclusion “cannot be
expected, and should not be applied, to deter objectively reasonable law
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enforcement activity.” Id. at 919. Recent “good faith” cases have reiterated that
exclusion is proper only where the conduct at issue is both sufficiently deliberate
and culpable. Herring, 555 U.S. at 144; Evans, 514 U.S. at 13–15. As the
Herring Court summarized, “the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate,
reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or
systemic negligence.” 555 U.S. at 144.
Third, courts must balance the benefits of deterrence against the costs of
excluding reliable evidence. Id. at 141; Leon, 468 U.S. at 906–07. “[T]o the
extent that application of the exclusionary rule could provide some incremental
deterrent, that possible benefit must be weighed against the substantial social
costs exacted by the exclusionary rule.” Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 352–53
(1987) (internal quotations omitted). The Court has described the appropriate
balance, stating that the “police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that
exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence
is worth the price paid by the justice system.” Herring, 555 U.S. at 144.
Finally, and related to the second principle discussed above, the Court has
imposed an important limit on law enforcement’s ability to invoke the good faith
exception. Leon made clear that the “benefits produced by suppressing evidence
obtained in objectively reasonable reliance on a subsequently invalidated search
warrant” are “marginal or nonexistent,” and are therefore outweighed by the costs
of exclusion. 468 U.S. at 922. But in other cases, where law enforcement’s
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reliance is not “objectively reasonable,” exclusion remains an appropriate remedy.
Id. at 922–23. A number of recent Supreme Court cases have discussed this
“objectively reasonable” requirement in the context of police officers relying on
law enforcement databases.
In both Herring and Evans, defendants were detained after electronic
warrant databases reported to law enforcement that there were outstanding
warrants for their arrest. Herring, 555 U.S. at 137; Evans, 514 U.S. at 4. In both
cases, however, the databases provided outdated information; Herring’s warrant
had been recalled, 555 U.S. at 138, and Evans’ warrant had been quashed, 514
U.S. at 4. Notwithstanding the constitutional violations, the Supreme Court
declined to suppress the evidence, finding that the officers’ reliance on the
warrant databases was objectively reasonable. In a concurring opinion in Evans,
Justice O’Connor cautioned that blind reliance on (potentially unreliable) law
enforcement databases might be unreasonable, precluding claims of good faith.
“Surely it would not be reasonable for the police to rely, say, on a recordkeeping
system, their own or some other agency’s, that has no mechanism to ensure its
accuracy over time and that routinely leads to false arrests.” 514 U.S. at 17(O’Connor, J., concurring). Later, in Herring, Justice Ginsburg’s dissenting
opinion echoed similar concerns, arguing that application of the exclusionary rule
incentivizes law enforcement agencies to maintain their databases with utmost
diligence. 555 U.S. at 153–57 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Responding to those
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concerns, the Herring majority conceded that, in a different case, if “systemic
errors [in maintaining a database] were demonstrated, it might be reckless for
officers to rely on an unreliable warrant system.” Id. at 146. Thus, “[i]f the
police have been shown to be reckless in maintaining a warrant system, or to have
knowingly made false entries to lay the groundwork for future false arrests,
exclusion would certainly be justified under our cases should such misconduct
cause a Fourth Amendment violation.” Id.B. Analysis
With these principles guiding our analysis, we turn to the case at bar. We
review the district court’s decision to apply the good faith exception to the
exclusionary rule de novo. United States v. Johnson, 408 F.3d 1313, 1320 (10th
Cir. 2005). Resolution of this case turns on our answers to two important
questions. We note at the outset that, for purposes of this dual inquiry, we are
assuming, but not deciding, that there was a constitutional violation. Cf. Herring,
555 U.S. at 139. With that assumption in hand, we first ask whether the trooper’s
conduct was deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent, such that similar conduct
could and should be deterred through exclusion. Second, we ask whether any
such constitutional violation was the product of recurring or systemic negligence.
On the facts of this case, we answer both of these questions in the negative.
We turn first to an assessment of the trooper’s individual conduct. In Mr.
Esquivel-Rios’s view, the district court erroneously concluded “a reasonable
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officer in Dean’s position could reasonably assume that Colorado maintained a
record of temporary tags in a database available to law enforcement.” Aplt. Br.
27 (quoting Esquivel-Rios, 39 F. Supp. 3d at 1188). He contends that, given both
the trooper’s previous experience with temporary tags and Lathan’s statement, it
constituted gross negligence to rely on a “no return” report as the foundation for a
reasonable suspicion determination. We disagree that the trooper’s conduct rises
to a level of culpability warranting exclusion.
In our view, Lathan’s statement is the only complicating factor in an
otherwise straight-forward case. Absent that statement, the record reflects only a
Kansas State Trooper with no first-hand knowledge of how the relevant Colorado
database works, who believes the database is reliable, and who mistakenly recalls
obtaining registration information for Colorado temporary tags in the past. As the
district court noted, there was no evidence to suggest the trooper intentionally
remained unaware of how Colorado maintained registration information for
temporary tags, and he had received no training about the type of information that
is or is not entered into the Colorado database. Morever, we note that, at the time
of the stop, at least one Tenth Circuit case had found reasonable suspicion based
on similar reports. See, e.g., Cortez-Galaviz, 495 F.3d 1203; Garcia-Ballesteros,
74 F.3d 1250; cf. Davis v. United States, 131 S. Ct. 2419 (2011).
The fact of Lathan’s statement, however, complicates matters somewhat.
We are left to consider whether the content and nature of that statement renders
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the trooper’s reliance on the database objectively unreasonable. For several
reasons we decline to hold that this statement, standing alone, renders that
reliance objectively unreasonable. For starters, we agree with the district court
that Lathan’s comment was both equivocal and anecdotal. Reporting that certain
information “usually” does not return is much different than stating certain
information is categorically unavailable. For that matter, Lathan did not know
why temporary tag information “usually” did not return. In fact, the results
Lathan received contained some indicia of reliability—they were “response[s]
from DMV.” 4 R. 52–53.
All that aside, we simply cannot conclude that the trooper’s conduct was
“sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice
system.” Herring, 555 U.S. at 144. “We have never suggested that the
exclusionary rule must apply in every circumstance in which it might provide
marginal deterrence.” Id. at 141 (citation omitted). Here, Lathan’s statement,
made in response to Trooper Dean’s request for clarification, would not have put
a reasonable officer on notice that the entire database was unreliable. Without
such notice, there is no misconduct to deter; there is only objectively reasonable
law enforcement activity. It might be a different case if we were considering a
Colorado law enforcement officer’s reliance on a CCIC database report; record
evidence suggests that Colorado law enforcement personnel were aware that the
CCIC database did not contain temporary tag registration information. But such
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facts are not before us.
Turning to the issue of recurring or systemic negligence, Mr. Esquivel-Rios
urges this court to focus on the conduct of CBI, as operators of the database that
led to the assumed constitutional violation. He argues that CBI knowingly “laid
the groundwork for future false arrests,” Aplt. Br. 18, and did so in violation of
both Colorado law and a Federal Bureau of Investigation mandate, id. at 19.
We reject the argument that any Fourth Amendment violation was the result
of recurring or systemic negligence on behalf of CBI. Mindful of the Supreme
Court’s caution concerning databases rife with systemic errors, we read those
cautionary statements as admonishments to law enforcement to avoid boot-
strapping. But even if those statements could be or should be interpreted more
broadly, they cannot fairly be interpreted to mean that every law enforcement
agency using something less than an all-encompassing database is systemically
negligent. Of course, the creation and maintenance of comprehensive law
enforcement databases implicates policy decisions, including decisions about
resource and personnel allocation, as well as interagency information-sharing.
While we would not sanction a law enforcement regime that routinely leads to
false arrests due to grossly mismanaged databases, we decline to find gross
mismanagement where one agency (CDOR) has the information that another
agency (CBI) needs to maintain a complete database. As the district court
correctly noted, there is no evidence that CBI negligently failed to update its
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database or routinely made record-keeping errors—it simply did not have the
information it needed.
We also find unpersuasive Mr. Esquivel-Rios’ argument that CBI’s
operation of the CCIC database ran afoul of an FBI mandate and Colorado statute.
First, he provides no support for his argument concerning a federal mandate.
Second, the Colorado statute he relies on, Colo. Rev. Stat. § 24-33.5-412(1)(c.5),
permits but does not require CBI to “maintain a computerized data file of motor
vehicle information.” Further, that provision refers to “motor vehicle information
received from the department of revenue.” Id. (emphasis added). It is undisputed
here that CBI did not receive from CDOR information pertaining to temporary
tags until 2012. Finally, Mr. Esquivel-Rio’s assertion that CBI “instructed” the
database to provide “not on file” responses in order to lay the groundwork for
future false arrests is entirely speculative.
Here, a law enforcement officer of one state relied on the law enforcement
database of another state. The record does not support a finding that his reliance
was reckless, grossly negligent, or otherwise objectively unreasonable. It also
does not support a finding that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, by failing to
obtain and report temporary tag information in its database in 2010, negligently
maintained a database it knew was leading to unconstitutional detentions.
Accordingly, exclusion is not warranted.
The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
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