United States of America v. Anthony Glover

United States Court of Appeals
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT
Argued February 7, 2025 Decided July 22, 2025
No. 23-3226
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
APPELLEE
v.
ANTHONY GLOVER,
APPELLANT
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the District of Columbia
(No. 1:20-cr-00204-1)
Isra Bhatty, Assistant Federal Public Defender, argued the
cause for appellant. With her on the briefs was A. J. Kramer,
Federal Public Defender. Tony Axam Jr., Assistant Federal
Public Defender, entered an appearance.
Timothy R. Cahill, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the
cause for appellee. With him on the brief were Matthew M.
Graves, U.S. Attorney, at the time the brief was filed, and
Chrisellen R. Kolb and Nicholas P. Coleman, Assistant U.S.
Attorneys.

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Before: PILLARD, RAO and CHILDS, Circuit Judges.
Opinion for the court filed by Circuit Judge CHILDS.
CHILDS, Circuit Judge: Anthony Glover, Defendant-
Appellant, appeals the district court’s denial of a motion to
suppress evidence supporting his conviction, which he
contends was obtained through an unlawful search of DaKnea
Brewer’s apartment. The district court concluded that the
search was lawful because Brewer gave voluntary consent,
finding that the police officer asking to search the apartment
relayed his request in a polite and friendly manner and that
Brewer’s gestures and responses indicated that she agreed to
the search. The district court did not sufficiently consider,
however, whether statements by the police officer alluding to
arrest warrants for her brothers rendered Brewer’s assent to the
officer’s request mere acquiescence to a claim of lawful
authority to conduct a search. We vacate the district court’s
order and remand for further proceedings.
I.
A.
On September 16, 2020, Metropolitan Police Department
(MPD) officers went to the home of DaKnea Brewer looking
for her two brothers, pursuant to an arrest warrant. At around
6:30 a.m., Brewer responded to knocks on her door by Officer
Eldrick Creamer. Officer Creamer said that he needed to talk
to her about something “important” concerning her brothers,
noting that he did not want to talk out in the hallway where
everyone could hear the conversation. J.A. 166. Brewer said
“uh-huh.” Id. Officer Creamer then asked, “I hope you don’t
mind, may I please come in?” Id. Brewer opened the door

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fully, and Officer Creamer entered Brewer’s apartment,
apologizing for waking her up. Additional officers followed
Officer Creamer into the apartment. Once inside, Officer
Creamer asked whether Brewer’s brothers were in the
apartment and whether they lived in the apartment. Brewer
said no. Officer Creamer stated that he and the other officers
had been sent “looking for [Brewer’s] brothers.” J.A. 168. He
also asked if there was anyone else in the apartment, and
Brewer replied that there were other people in the apartment,
but not her brothers.
Officer Creamer then stated: “Okay, well listen, I have got
warrants.” Id. Brewer responded, “That is fine, my brother is
not here though.” Id. Officer Creamer replied that what he
“need[ed] to do, without touching any of [Brewer’s] stuff,
without disrupting [her] house,” was that he “need[ed] to
visually see” whether Brewer’s brothers were in her apartment,
“check them off” and then he would be “gone.” Id. Brewer
then said, “All right, that is fine.” Id. As she walked down a
hallway turning on the lights, she waved her hand forward and
remarked “you all can . . . .” J.A. 169. An MPD officer then
entered a bedroom, where he saw Glover sleeping and a firearm
near him. The officers arrested Glover.
B.
Glover was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm
by a person convicted of a felony, in violation of 18 U.S.C.
§ 922(g)(1). Glover filed a motion to suppress evidence under
the Fourth Amendment, arguing that the firearm was found
through an unlawful search of Brewer’s apartment.
The district court held a suppression hearing. Officer
Creamer testified that the officers did not have a search
warrant, and that he told Brewer he had “warrants” without

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clarifying whether he had “a search warrant or an arrest
warrant.” J.A. 88. Officer Creamer further testified that he
said to Brewer that he “needed to go through the apartment,”
but that he admittedly did not ask Brewer if he could search the
apartment. J.A. 88–89. Neither did he inform Brewer that she
could refuse to consent to the search. Brewer did not testify at
the hearing.
On review of Officer Creamer’s body-worn camera
footage and his testimony, the district court found that the
officers’ interactions with Brewer were generally friendly and
non-threatening, and that Brewer’s words and gestures
indicated that she assented to Officer Creamer’s request to
search the apartment. The district court further found that
when Officer Creamer said, “I have got warrants,” Brewer
“seemed to understand that . . . he meant arrest warrants.” J.A.
168. The district court then determined that the totality of the
circumstances showed that Brewer voluntarily consented to the
search and therefore denied Glover’s motion to suppress the
evidence.
Glover pleaded guilty, reserving his right to appeal the
district court’s denial of his motion to suppress. Glover then
filed this appeal. We have jurisdiction to review the district
court’s judgment. 28 U.S.C. § 1291.
II.
On appeal of a district court’s denial of a motion to
suppress, “we review legal conclusions de novo and factual
findings for clear error.” United States v. Guertin, 67 F.4th
445, 449 (D.C. Cir. 2023) (quotations and citation omitted).1
1 Glover contends that we should review the district court’s factual
findings de novo, principally because the facts are captured on body-

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III.
The Fourth Amendment generally prohibits warrantless
entry and search of a person’s home. See Brigham City v.
Stuart, 547 U.S. 398, 403 (2006). Evidence obtained through
an unlawful search in most circumstances must be suppressed.
See United States v. Dawkins, 17 F.3d 399, 407–08 (D.C. Cir.
1994). Generally, “voluntary consent of an individual
possessing authority” over the person’s home is an exception
to the warrant requirement. Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S.
103, 109 (2006) (citation omitted). Glover challenges the
district court’s finding that Brewer gave voluntary consent for
the MPD officers to enter and then search her home. Glover
contends that the evidence that he possessed a firearm must be
suppressed as the fruit of a warrantless search.
A.
We first consider Glover’s argument that the district court
erred in finding that Brewer gave voluntary consent to the
officers’ search of her apartment. Glover principally contends
that Officer Creamer’s statements that he had “warrants,” as
well as his statement that he “need[ed]” to search the
worn camera footage and are not in dispute, citing United States v.
Lewis, 921 F.2d 1294, 1301 (D.C. Cir. 1990). Glover offers no
reason that would justify departing from our well-settled standards
of review for motions to suppress evidence. Even when presented
with body-worn camera footage, we have reviewed a district court’s
findings of fact on a motion to suppress for clear error. See United
States v. Bryant, 111 F.4th 105, 108 (D.C. Cir. 2024). Glover’s
reliance on Lewis is also misplaced. In Lewis, we reviewed de novo
the district court’s finding of voluntariness, because the district court
ruled on consent as a matter of law, without making any of the
requisite findings of fact. Lewis, 921 F.2d at 1301.

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apartment, rendered whatever assent Brewer may have given
to the search mere acquiescence to an officer’s claim of lawful
authority to conduct the search. According to Glover, the
district court erred by failing to consider whether those
references to legal authority to conduct a search rendered
Brewer’s assent to a search mere acquiescence rather than
voluntary consent. We agree.
Discerning whether consent to a search is voluntary
depends on “careful” consideration of the “totality of all the
circumstances.” Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 227
(1973); see also United States v. Wilson, 605 F.3d 985, 1027
(D.C. Cir. 2010); United States v. Hall, 969 F.2d 1102, 1106
(D.C. Cir. 1992). “[T]he voluntariness inquiry turns not on
whether a ‘reasonable’ person in the defendant’s position
would have felt compelled to consent to a police officer’s
request to search, but, rather, on whether” the person who
agreed to the search “actually felt compelled to consent.” Hall,
969 F.2d at 1106. A person cannot give voluntary consent,
however, if she agrees to a search “only in submission to [an
officer’s] claim of lawful authority” to carry out the search.
Bustamonte, 412 U.S. at 233.
Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U.S. 543 (1968), provides
the framework for distinguishing mere acquiescence to legal
authority from voluntary consent to a search. In Bumper, four
White law enforcement officers appeared at the house of a 66-
year-old Black woman, Hattie Leath, in search of her grandson,
Wayne Bumper. Id. at 546. One of the officers stated, “I have
a search warrant to search your house.” Id. Leath responded
“Go ahead” and opened the door. Id. Inside the house, the
officers found a rifle that was later introduced as evidence
against Bumper in a criminal trial. Id. The prosecution argued
that the search was lawful because Leath consented, not
because a warrant authorized the search. Id. On appeal of

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Bumper’s unsuccessful motion to suppress, the Supreme Court
described the question presented as “whether a search can be
justified as lawful on the basis of consent when that ‘consent’
has been given only after the official conducting the search has
asserted that he possesses a warrant.” Id. at 548. Bumper held
that Leath did not consent to the search, because “[w]hen a law
enforcement officer claims authority to search a home under a
warrant, he announces in effect that the occupant has no right
to resist the search,” and such a “situation is instinct with
coercion—albeit colorably lawful coercion.” Id. at 550.
In Bustamonte, the Supreme Court further clarified the
standard for assessing voluntary consent to a search. There, a
police officer stopped a car with a burned-out headlight and
license plate light and asked the passenger if he could search
the car’s trunk, without claiming to have lawful authority to
carry out the search. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. at 220. The
defendant’s challenge rested on the police officer’s failure to
inform the passenger that he could refuse the search, and the
question before the Supreme Court was whether “the State
must affirmatively prove that the subject of the search knew
that he had a right to refuse consent.” Id. at 229. Bustamonte
held that “knowledge of a right to refuse is not a prerequisite of
a voluntary consent.” Id. at 234. Instead, to determine whether
a person has given voluntary consent to a search, a court must
analyze “all the circumstances” through a “careful sifting of the
unique facts and circumstances of each case.” Id. at 233.
Bustamonte did not overrule Bumper. Bustamonte
favorably cited Bumper to stress that assent to a search
“coerced by threats or force, or granted only in submission to a
claim of lawful authority” is not voluntary consent. Id. More
generally, Bustamonte reaffirmed that the Fourth Amendment
requires that consent to a search “not be coerced, by explicit or
implicit means, by implied threat or covert force,” because “no

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matter how subtly the coercion was applied, the resulting
‘consent’ would be no more than a pretext for the unjustified
police intrusion against which the Fourth Amendment is
directed.” Id. at 228. Since Bustamonte, the Supreme Court
has underscored that the Government’s burden to show
voluntary consent to a search “is not satisfied by showing a
mere submission to a claim of lawful authority.” Florida v.
Royer, 460 U.S. 491, 497 (1983) (citations omitted).
Glover’s appeal turns on the district court’s application of
Bumper. The district court stated that, in Bumper, “the critical
fact . . . [was] the fact that the police sought consent by alluding
to a warrant that did not exist,” and reasoned that, because that
fact “is not present here,” Bumper was not “applicable.” J.A.
169, 175. Bumper is, to be sure, frequently applied to situations
where a person agrees to a search after officers misrepresent
that they have a search warrant. See, e.g., Hadley v. Williams,
368 F.3d 747, 749 (7th Cir. 2004). But that is just one specific
application of Bumper’s broader holding that consent is not
voluntary when it is “granted only in submission to a claim of
lawful authority.” Bustamonte, 42 U.S. at 233 (citing Bumper,
391 U.S. at 548).
Contrary to the district court’s interpretation, Bumper’s
holding is not limited to situations in which a police officer
misrepresents the existence of a warrant. Indeed, in Bumper,
the police officers did have a warrant, although its validity had
not been tested in court. See Bumper, 391 U.S. at 550 n. 15;
see also id. at 562 (White, J., dissenting). The critical fact in
Bumper was not that a law enforcement officer misrepresented
that he had a warrant; it was that “a law enforcement officer
claim[ed] authority to search a home under a warrant,” and
therefore “he announce[d] in effect that the occupant ha[d] no
right to resist the search.” Bumper, 391 U.S. at 550; see also
Orhorhaghe v. INS, 38 F.3d 488, 501 (9th Cir. 1994)

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(“Bumper . . . stands for the proposition that a consent is
ineffective if it follows an express or implied claim by the
police that they can immediately proceed to make the search in
any event.” (quotations and citation omitted)). Bumper
requires that courts consider if any claims of lawful authority—
whether false, ambiguous, or true—vitiated voluntary consent.
While the district court properly read Bustamonte to call
for assessing the totality of the circumstances, the court’s
misreading of Bumper tainted its assessment here that Brewer
gave voluntary consent to the search. The district court
determined that in the officers’ interactions with Brewer there
were “no threats, no force . . . no vulnerable victim . . . no
subtly coercive questioning” and “no false claim of authority.”
J.A. 172–73 (emphasis added). Having found that Officer
Creamer made no false claim of authority, the district court
determined that Bumper was not applicable. That was legal
error. The district court did not properly consider whether
Officer Creamer’s reference to warrants was a claim of lawful
authority to carry out the search, which influenced Brewer’s
understanding of whether she could refuse the search.
The district court found that when Officer Creamer stated
he had “warrants,” he “was telling Brewer that there were
outstanding arrest warrants for the brothers and that he was not
asking to search the apartment.” J.A. 175. Critically, however,
the district court did not determine whether Officer Creamer’s
references to a warrant—even if understood to be for an arrest
and not a search warrant—rendered Brewer’s assent to a search
mere acquiescence. In other words, the district court did not
consider whether Officer Creamer’s “invocation of a warrant
was tantamount to a pronouncement that [Brewer] had no right
to resist the search.” United States v. Griffith, 867 F.3d 1265,
1280 (D.C. Cir. 2017) (quotations and citation omitted).

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Nor did the district court consider whether Officer
Creamer’s statement that he “need[ed]” to search the apartment
for Brewer’s brothers in conjunction with his reference to
warrants rendered Brewer’s assent to the search mere
acquiescence. J.A. 174. The district court observed that
Officer Creamer’s statement that he “need[ed]” to search for
Brewer’s brothers, “did not appear in context to be an assertion
of authority he lacked, but rather a plea.” J.A. 174–75. But it
did not consider the compounded effect of Officer Creamer’s
statements that he had warrants and that he needed to search
the apartment for Brewer’s brothers on Brewer’s ability to
voluntarily consent to the search.
We leave it to the district court in the first instance to
determine whether the facts presented indicate that Officer
Creamer’s reference to warrants, either alone or in conjunction
with his statement that he needed to search for Brewer’s
brothers, rendered Brewer’s assent to the search mere
acquiescence. In similar contexts, sibling circuits have
considered whether an officer’s references to a warrant that did
not cover the requested search were nevertheless understood by
the recipient to assert lawful authority to conduct the search,
therefore vitiating consent. See, e.g., United States v. Nafzger,
965 F.2d 213, 217–18 (7th Cir. 1992) (“[A] dairy farmer with
no criminal record[ ] could not be expected to distinguish
between a search warrant of [a] truck and a search warrant for
[a] truck.”); United States v. Medlin, 842 F.2d 1194, 1198 (10th
Cir. 1988) (“[A] layperson, under . . . extreme
conditions . . . could hardly be expected to distinguish between
that part of the search which was authorized by warrant, and
for which his consent was unnecessary, and that part of the
search which was unauthorized.”).
* * *

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Accordingly, the district court failed to properly consider
whether claims of lawful authority to conduct a search rendered
Brewer’s consent mere acquiescence, as required by Bumper
and Bustamonte. Because the district court applied the wrong
legal standard, and its “mistake of law infected its factual
finding regarding consent,” we “remand for further findings on
that factual question.” United States v. Maragh, 894 F.2d 415,
419 (D.C. Cir. 1990).
B.
Glover also argues that the district court erred in finding
that Brewer voluntarily consented to the officers’ entry into her
home. The Government contends that Glover raises this
challenge regarding consent to entry for the first time on
appeal. We agree. Glover did not sufficiently raise his claim
that evidence of the firearm was the fruit of the police officers’
unlawful entry to Brewer’s apartment. See United States v.
Williams, 773 F.3d 98, 104 (D.C. Cir. 2014). In his briefing
submitted to the district court, Glover challenged only whether
Brewer gave consent “to search the apartment.” J.A. 28. At
the subsequent suppression hearing, defense counsel did not
directly argue that Brewer failed to give voluntary consent to
entry. Instead, defense counsel contended that Brewer did not
give voluntary consent to search.
Assuming that we review Glover’s unpreserved challenge
to consent to entry for plain error, the district court made no
error that was “clear or obvious.” Rosales-Mireles v. United
States, 585 U.S. 129, 134 (2018). Glover contends that the
officers’ actions from the moment they arrived at Brewer’s
door “conveyed an unrelenting sense of urgency [and]
necessity” that pressured Brewer into allowing the officers into
her home. Def’s Br. 19. The district court, however, found
that when Officer Creamer and Brewer were speaking before

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he entered the apartment, his “tone” was “friendly and polite
and his weapon was not drawn.” J.A. 166. The district court
further found that Officer Creamer asked “may I please come
in,” and Brewer “opened the door” in response. J.A. 166–67.
Based on the record, we see no plain error regarding the police
officers’ entry into the apartment.2
IV.
For the foregoing reasons, we vacate the district court’s
denial of the motion to suppress. Because Glover’s conviction
turned entirely on evidence secured through the search of
Brewer’s home, we vacate his conviction. We remand to the
district court for further proceedings consistent with this
opinion.
So ordered.
2 When requesting to enter the apartment, Officer Creamer did not
reference or display any warrants, display his badge or his weapon,
or otherwise make any claim of legal authority to enter the apartment.

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