United States of America v. Luis Santos

NOT FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
LUIS SANTOS,
Defendant-Appellant.
No. 18-50039
D.C. No.
2:16-cr-00849-DSF-1
MEMORANDUM*
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Central District of California
Dale S. Fischer, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted March 5, 2019
Pasadena, California
Before: COLE**, Chief Judge, and FISHER and NGUYEN, Circuit Judges.
Luis Santos appeals the denial of his motion to suppress evidence that was
seized following a traffic stop. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and
affirm.
Santos contends that the traffic stop was not supported by reasonable
* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.
** The Honorable R. Guy Cole, Jr., United States Chief Judge for the
Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting by designation.
FILED
MAR 14 2019
MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
U.S. COURT OF APPEALS

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suspicion. We agree that the initial stop violated the Fourth Amendment because
there is no evidence in the record of any traffic violation. The government has
chosen not to rely on Deputy James Peterson’s testimony. Thus, the only evidence
of the stop is the video from the patrol car’s dash-camera, which does not show
any basis for the stop.
Santos next argues that the subsequent search and seizure of forty pounds of
methamphetamine from a tire in the trunk, and his later admission to transporting
the methamphetamine, should be suppressed. Generally, evidence obtained
through an unlawful search or seizure is the “fruit of the poisonous tree” and
inadmissible under the exclusionary rule. Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S.
471, 484–88 (1963). However, fruits of unlawful searches may be admissible
when the fruits are discovered “by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged
of the primary taint.” Id. at 488. We consider the following factors: (1) the
temporal proximity between the unlawful stop and the acquisition of evidence, (2)
the presence of intervening circumstances, and (3) the purpose and flagrancy of the
official misconduct. See Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 603–04 (1975).
Here, the second Brown factor—the presence of intervening
circumstances—weighs strongly against Santos. Minutes after the traffic stop and
soon after Deputy Peterson placed Santos in the back of the police car, Santos’s
cousin, who was one of passengers in Santos’s car, climbed over the center console

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into the driver’s seat and fled in the vehicle. Santos’s cousin merged back onto the
freeway with the wrong blinker illuminated and crashed shortly thereafter. When
Deputy Michael Vann arrived on the scene to provide backup, he found Santos’s
car two miles down the freeway from the location of the traffic stop. The car was
roughly 100 feet off the road and had been driven through a fence. It had sustained
visible damage. Santos’s cousin lay on the side of the freeway with serious
injuries. The third passenger was not at the scene. After towing the car back to the
station, officers opened a deflated tire in the trunk of Santos’s car and discovered
forty pounds of methamphetamine.
Under these circumstances, we conclude that the taint from the illegal traffic
stop did not “tend[] to significantly direct the investigation to the evidence in
question.” United States v. Chamberlin, 644 F.2d 1262, 1269 (9th Cir. 1980). The
erratic flight from the police, beginning with Santos’s cousin driving off onto the
freeway with the incorrect blinker illuminated and ending with him crashing two
miles away through a fence and severely injuring himself, sufficiently attenuated
the taint from the initial stop. See, e.g., United States v. Garcia, 516 F.2d 318, 319
(9th Cir. 1975) (finding that suspicious behavior, a suspicious vehicle, and an
erratic, high-speed chase attenuated the taint); United States v. Boone, 62 F.3d 323,
325 (10th Cir. 1995) (finding the taint dissipated when motorists dangerously sped
away from a traffic stop and tossed drug-laced glass bottles out of the car).

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Santos’s cousin committed a voluntary, intervening act of dangerous flight that
resulted in serious injury and broke the causal chain.1 Cf. United States v. Ogilvie,
527 F.2d 330, 332 (9th Cir. 1975) (finding that a safe flight did not give rise to
reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop).
Finally, the totality of the circumstances here, including the unsafe flight and
resulting injuries to the driver and the flight of the other passenger, supplied the
officers with probable cause to search the trunk of the car and the tire within it.
See United States v. Roberts, 470 F.2d 858, 859 (9th Cir. 1972) (“[W]hen Roberts
drove away at high speed [in conjunction with the other suspicious facts], he
thereby supplied probable cause to believe that there was someone or something in
the car of an incriminating character”).
AFFIRMED.
1 We conclude that the first Brown factor—temporal proximity—is neutral at best.
The record does not reveal exactly when officers found the methamphetamine, but
it is clear that the search was not conducted at the scene. The third Brown factor—
the flagrancy of the police misconduct—weighs in Santos’s favor because the stop
was improper, but the misconduct is not sufficient to overcome the attenuation of
the taint from the dangerous flight.

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