United States of America v. SAMUEL OSWALDO RIVERA-PADILLA a/k/a Samuel O. Rivera Samuel O. Rivera-Padilla

NOT PRECEDENTIAL
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
NO. 07-4093
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
v.
SAMUEL OSWALDO RIVERA-PADILLA
a/k/a Samuel O. Rivera
Samuel O. Rivera-Padilla
Appellant
On Appeal From the United States District Court
For the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
(D.C. Crim. Action No. 07-cr-00111)
District Judge: Hon. Thomas M. Golden
Argued February 2, 2009
BEFORE: McKEE and STAPLETON, Circuit Judges,
and IRENAS,* District Judge
(Opinion Filed: February 17, 2010)
*Hon. Joseph E. Irenas, Senior United States District Judge for the District of New
Jersey, sitting by designation.

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Michael D. Raffaele (Argued)
Federal Public Defender’s Office
601 Walnut Street
The Curtis Center - Suite 540 West
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Attorney for Appellant
Vineet Gauri (Argued)
Office of the United States Attorney
615 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Attorney for Appellee
OPINION OF THE COURT
PER CURIAM:
Appellant Samuel O. Rivera-Padilla was charged with possession of a gun by an
illegal alien in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g); making false statements to a federal
firearms licensee in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(1)(A); and making a false claim of
United States citizenship in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 911. Prior to trial, he filed a motion
to suppress evidence which was granted in part and denied in part. Rivera-Padilla then
pled guilty, while preserving his right to appellate review of the District Court’s ruling
denying the bulk of his suppression motion. We will reverse.
I.
The relevant facts are not in dispute. Special agents of the United States

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (“ICE”) arrived at Rivera-Padilla’s home
in Reading, Pennsylvania, at 6:30 in the morning with an arrest warrant charging him
with immigration offenses. Rivera-Padilla answered their knock on his front door
wearing a pair of boxer shorts. He immediately acknowledged that he was the individual
they were seeking. They handcuffed him in his living room and conducted a protective
sweep of both floors of the home.
Special Agent Michael Pausic asked Rivera-Padilla where his clothes were and
whether he had any identification. Rivera-Padilla told Pausic to go to the upstairs
bedroom facing the street. When Pausic reached that bedroom, he saw a closed wallet
lying on the bed. He seized the wallet, opened it, and searched its contents. He hoped to
find confirmation of Rivera-Padilla’s identity and evidence of his country of origin.
Among those contents was a gun permit. His inspection revealed that it belonged to
Rivera-Padilla. Agent Pausic did not ask Rivera-Padilla to consent to the search or
whether there was identification inside the wallet.
Agent Pausic, without informing Rivera-Padilla of his Miranda rights, called down
the stairs to Rivera-Padilla and asked him where the firearm was. Rivera-Padilla
responded that it was in a box in the closet of the same bedroom. Pausic located a lock-
box on a shelf in the closet but was unable to locate a key. When asked, Rivera-Padilla

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The District Court did suppress Rivera-Padilla’s statement as to where in the house1
the gun was located, ruling that the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine does not apply to
Fifth Amendment violations, citing Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 309 (1985). This
issue was not appealed. As noted hereafter, however, the discovery of the gun was
clearly a direct result of the illegal search of the wallet, absent which Agent Pausic would
not have asked Rivera-Padilla about the existence or location of the gun.
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told him that the keys were on the dresser. In the lock-ox, Pausic found a handgun. The1
agents then let Rivera-Padilla dress and drove him to the Philadelphia ICE facility, a trip
that consumed an hour and a half to two hours.
The agents processed Rivera-Padilla and placed him by himself in a holding cell.
Approximately five hours after his arrest in Reading, Pausic and another agent conducted
the second interrogation of Rivera-Padilla. Pausic, who had conducted the earlier,
unwarned interrogation of Rivera-Padilla, also led this second interrogation. This time,
Pausic gave Rivera-Padilla the Miranda warnings. Rivera-Padilla acknowledged and
waived his Miranda rights. Pausic then interviewed Rivera-Padilla. Rivera-Padilla
confessed to ownership of the gun and to making false statements in the gun permit
application.
Rivera-Padilla moved to suppress the gun, the gun permit, and his inculpatory
statements. The District Court held that the search of the wallet and seizure of the gun
permit were lawful. While it agreed with Rivera-Padilla that the inculpatory statements
made in his home without Miranda warnings should be suppressed, it further held that
this violation of his Fifth Amendment rights did not require suppression of the gun or the

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statements made at the ICE facility.
II.
By its very terms, the Fourth Amendment affords protection against unreasonable
searches and seizures of a person’s “effects.” U.S. Const. amend. IV. Accordingly, a
warrantless search of a closed wallet is an unreasonable search under the Fourth
Amendment unless it is justified by one of the recognized exceptions to the warrant
requirement. United States v. Berenguer, 562 F.2d 206 (2d Cir. 1977). Here, the
government acknowledges that Rivera-Padilla did not consent to the search of the wallet.
Nor does it contend that it was a search of Rivera-Padilla’s person and surrounding area
incident to his arrest. Rather, the government insists that Pausic’s actions were justified
by the “plain view” exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement.
The Supreme Court explained the “plain view” doctrine and the rationale behind it
in Minnesota v. Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366, 375 (1993) (citations omitted; brackets in
original):
Under that doctrine, if police are lawfully in a position from which they
view an object, if its incriminating character is immediately apparent, and if
the officers have a lawful right of access to the object, they may seize it
without a warrant.
* * *
The rationale of the plain-view doctrine is that if contraband is left in open
view and is observed by a police officer from a lawful vantage point, there
has been no invasion of a legitimate expectation of privacy and thus no
“search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment – or at least no
search independent of the initial intrusion that gave the officers their

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vantage point.
Agent Pausic was authorized to enter Rivera-Padilla’s home for the purpose of
arresting him. After accomplishing that task and associated precautionary measures, he
decided that he would look for evidence tending to confirm Rivera-Padilla’s identity and
establish his country of origin, a search which he was not authorized to make. While the
plain view doctrine might arguably have extended his authority to seize such evidence
had it been in plain view, no such evidence, or any other incriminating evidence, was in
plain view. All that was in plain view was an ordinary wallet whose contents, in which
Rivera-Padilla retained a reasonable expectation of privacy, were not visible. It was not
until Pausic searched inside the wallet that the gun permit came into plain view. The
plain view doctrine does not authorize an otherwise unauthorized search, even if it is a
fruitful one. Indeed, the plain view doctrine does not authorize searches; by definition, it
only authorizes seizures of items in plain view to which the officer has a right of access.
See Dickerson, 508 U.S. at 375.
In Berenguer, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was confronted with a
situation almost identical to the one before us. Berenguer was arrested in his apartment
on a drug charge. After he had been shackled and placed on a bed, the arresting agents
conducted a protective sweep of the apartment. They observed a billfold, which when
searched was found to contain approximately $3,200 in $100 bills. The District Court
declined to suppress the cash, relying on the “plain view” doctrine. The Court of Appeals

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Here, as in Berenguer, “[n]o claim is made here that the money was taken to the2
station house and inventoried for appellant’s protection . . . . Such a claim would be
inconsistent with the government’s contention that it seized evidence whose incriminating
nature was readily apparent.” Berenguer, 562 F.2d at 211, n.7.
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reversed because that doctrine required that “the incriminating nature [of the seized item]
must be immediately apparent,” and this requirement was clearly not met. Berenguer,
562 F.2d at 210. There, as here, the “billfold offered no immediately apparent evidence
of an inculpatory nature. It was only after the billfold itself had been searched that the
large denomination currency was revealed.” Id.
The “plain view” doctrine did not authorize the search of Rivera-Padilla’s wallet
under the circumstances before us.2
III.
The government acknowledges that, if the search and seizure of Rivera-Padilla’s
wallet were unlawful, the gun permit and the gun must be suppressed as “fruits of the
poisonous tree.” Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (1963). It insists, however,
that Rivera-Padilla’s confession at the ICE facility would remain admissible evidence
even if the wallet search and seizure violated the Fourth Amendment.
The parties agree on the factors to be considered in determining whether this
confession was fruit of the Fourth Amendment violation: Miranda warnings do not alone
break the causal connection between the illegality and the confession. They are, however,
an important factor to be considered in determining whether the confession was obtained

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by exploitation of an illegal search and seizure. Also to be considered are the temporal
proximity between the illegality and the confession, the presence of intervening
circumstances, and “particularly, the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct.”
Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 604 (1975). The government bears the burden of
establishing, based on the totality of the circumstances, that there was a break in the chain
of causation between the constitutional violation and the later confession. Taylor v.
Alabama, 457 U.S. 687 (1982).
We conclude that the government has not carried its burden. Each step in the
chain of events from the discovery of the gun permit to the confession of the crime of
conviction followed directly and quickly from the preceding step. Agent Pausic
immediately used the gun permit to extract incriminating statements from Rivera-Padilla
and to find the gun. Thereafter, in the space of only a few hours all in uninterrupted
detention, the permit, gun, and incriminating, un-Mirandaized statements were used to
extract a full confession. The temporal separation between the unlawful search and the
confession was about five hours, and there were no intervening events to break the chain.
Rivera-Padilla had no contact with anyone other than ICE agents, he was not taken before
a magistrate, and he had no contact with a lawyer. And the misconduct of Agent Pausic
was serious indeed. But for his utilization of the fruits of his Fourth and Fifth
Amendment violations, we are confident there would have been no confession to the
crime of conviction.

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IV.
Rivera-Padilla mounts a second challenge to his conviction. He contends that the
felon-in-possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), under which he was convicted is
unconstitutional on its face because it does not constitute a valid exercise of Congress’
authority under the Commerce Clause. He also insists that it is unconstitutional as
applied to him in this case in the absence of evidence that his alleged intrastate possession
of the gun was in or affected interstate commerce. Rivera-Padilla candidly
acknowledges, however, that this Court has explicitly upheld the constitutionality of this
statute despite consideration of these arguments, see United States v. Singletary, 268 F.3d
196 (3d Cir. 2001), and that he asserts them here solely to preserve them.
V.
We will reverse the judgment of the District Court and remand with instructions to
grant Rivera-Padilla’s motion to suppress in full.

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