United States of America v. Donta D. Bridges

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Argued June 5, 2024
Decided June 14, 2024
Before
FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge
MICHAEL B. BRENNAN, Circuit Judge
CANDACE JACKSON-AKIWUMI, Circuit Judge
No. 23-2183
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
DONTA D. BRIDGES,
Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District
Court for the Northern District of
Indiana, South Bend Division.
No. 3:19CR102-001
Jon E. DeGuilio,
Judge.
O R D E R
Donta Bridges was convicted after a jury trial of controlled substance offenses
and being a felon in possession of a firearm. On appeal, Bridges argues that the court
erred by denying him leave to file a motion to suppress nearly a year after he had the
information needed to file the motion and more than two years after the deadline for
pretrial motions had passed. Because the court did not abuse its discretion in
concluding that Bridges lacked good cause for his untimeliness, see FED. R. CRIM.
P. 12(c)(3), we affirm.
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with FED. R. A PP. P. 32.1

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No. 23-2183 Page 2
Relying on a tip from a confidential informant, police officers executed three
controlled drug purchases from a drug dealer known as “Man Man” who sold drugs
from a home on Brighton Street in La Porte, Indiana. The first two purchases occurred
on September 4 and September 24, 2019, both at 510 Brighton Street, where Man Man,
later identified as Bridges, lived.
The third controlled buy occurred on November 1. This time, Bridges instructed
the informant to meet him in a lot on the corner of Brighton Street and Heinz Street.
Bridges left 510 Brighton Street and met the informant in her car, where he gave her a
folded bag in exchange for $120. That bag contained 0.71 grams of a mixture of heroin,
fentanyl, and monoacetylmorphine.
Police officers then obtained a warrant to search 510 Brighton Street. (The
warrant, issued by an Indiana judge, and the affidavit of probable cause are not in the
record.) According to a summary that Bridges provided to the district court, the
affidavit of probable cause relied only on information from the controlled buy on
November 1.
On the morning of November 8, officers executed the search warrant. Bridges
was sitting on a recliner. Officers found a loaded firearm in a holster on the recliner. On
a nearby table, officers found a fake soda can with a hidden compartment that stored
three bags containing methamphetamine, fentanyl mixed with diphenhydramine, and a
mixture of fentanyl and heroin. In a kitchen drawer, officers discovered digital scales, a
syringe, and small bags. And a cell phone on the floor near Bridges contained selfies of
Bridges and communications with the informant about the third drug purchase.
Bridges was indicted on three counts of distributing and one count of possessing
with intent to distribute controlled substances, 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1); one count of being
a felon in possession of a firearm, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1); and one count of possessing a
firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking offense, 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(C)(i). At
Bridges’s arraignment, a magistrate judge entered a scheduling order setting a trial for
February 10, 2020, and requiring all pretrial motions to be filed no later than January 13,
2020. See FED. R. C RIM. P. 12(c)(1). The government was required to file notice of
evidence it intended to offer under Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence no later
than four business days before the final pretrial conference.
Bridges did not file any pretrial motions or ask for an extension of the deadline
before it passed. On January 23, 2020, he moved to continue the trial, and the district
court pushed it back to May. Bridges filed seven more requests for continuance between

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No. 23-2183 Page 3
April 2020 and October 2021, citing the difficulty of counsel-client communications
amid COVID-19 restrictions, the need to review additional discovery from the
government, and the need to investigate. The district court granted each request. After
the eighth continuance, the court set the trial for February 14, 2022, and the final pretrial
conference for February 3. Throughout this period, Bridges never sought leave to file a
pretrial motion.
On February 3, 2022, Bridges moved to continue the trial for the ninth time. The
court granted the motion and set the trial for June 6. The government filed a
superseding indictment on February 9. This indictment did not significantly alter the
charges against Bridges: it amended count two (stemming from the sale of xylazine) to
an attempt charge; changed the period of firearm possession in count six; and added
forfeiture allegations. On May 23, the court granted Bridges’s tenth motion to continue
the trial. The court set the trial for October 24 and the final pretrial conference for
October 13. Unprompted, the court ordered the government to file its Rule 404(b)
evidence by October 11 (less than four business days before the conference).
Eighteen days before trial, on October 6, Bridges moved for leave to file a motion
to suppress all evidence obtained from the search of his home. In a proposed motion to
suppress, Bridges asserted that the search violated the Fourth Amendment because
officers delayed executing the search warrant for several days, and the information
supporting probable cause had become stale. The district court ordered Bridges to
supplement his motion for leave with an explanation of any good cause for the lateness
of his suppression motion. Bridges’s counsel explained that he had assumed the search
warrant had been issued one or two days before the search on November 8, 2019, but
counsel had learned in October 2022 (when he contacted the clerk of the county circuit
court to inquire about the signature on the warrant) that this assumption was incorrect.
In fact, the warrant had been signed on November 2, 2019. Thus counsel had only
recently identified a potential staleness issue. The government opposed Bridges’s
motion for leave, arguing that he had not shown good cause and that considering a
suppression motion would require yet another postponement of the trial.
The district court denied leave to file the untimely motion to suppress. The court
determined that Bridges lacked good cause because he had sufficient information to file
a motion to suppress on staleness grounds by October 2021 when the government
produced the affidavit and redacted warrant. The affidavit revealed that the warrant
was based on the November 1 transaction, and Bridges already knew that the home was

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No. 23-2183 Page 4
searched on November 8. But it took him another year to move for suppression. The
court also considered that the trial had already been delayed ten times.
The case proceeded to a jury trial without further delay. Bridges was convicted
on all charges except possessing a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking. The district
court sentenced him to 210 months’ imprisonment and 6 years’ supervised release.
On appeal, Bridges argues that the district court erred by denying him leave to
file a motion to suppress. We review such a decision for abuse of discretion.
United States v. Johnson, 47 F.4th 535, 540 (7th Cir. 2022), cert. denied, 143 S. Ct. 813,
215 L. Ed. 2d 68 (2023). A motion to suppress generally must be filed within the
deadline set by the district court, but the court may accept an untimely motion if there
is good cause for the late submission. See FED. R. CRIM. P. 12(b)(3)(C), (c)(1), (c)(3);
United States v. Jackson, 5 F.4th 676, 682 (7th Cir. 2021). Good cause under Rule 12(c)(3) is
a “flexible standard.” See FED. R. C RIM. P. 12(c) advisory committee’s notes to 2014
amendments. We have said that there is no good cause for an untimely motion if a
defendant delays filing it after he knew all he needed to know to make his argument.
See United States v. Daniels, 803 F.3d 335, 352 (7th Cir. 2015).
Bridges raises four challenges to the conclusion that he lacked good cause. The
government asserts that he failed to raise them in the district court, but Bridges is not
prohibited from “appellate amplification” of his argument that he had good cause for
the lateness of his suppression motion. See Lawson v. Sun Microsystems, Inc., 791 F.3d
754, 761 (7th Cir. 2015) (citing Yee v. Escondido, 503 U.S. 519, 534 (1992)). In any event,
none of Bridges’s arguments is persuasive.
Bridges first argues that home searches are entitled to enhanced protection under
the Fourth Amendment, and the district court erred by not factoring the location of the
search into its good-cause analysis. But this argument goes to whether the search was
reasonable, not whether there was good cause. See United States v. Tepiew, 859 F.3d 452,
456 (7th Cir. 2017). Indeed, we have not previously discussed the location of the search
as a relevant factor when reviewing a good-cause determination. See Johnson, 47 F.4th at
540–41.
Bridges also argues that the district court erred by failing to consider when his
motion for leave was filed in relation to the superseding indictment filed in February
2022. But the superseding indictment was irrelevant to the timing of a suppression
motion based on staleness. The court did not enter a new scheduling order after the
superseding indictment, which was largely the same, and the charges were still based

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on evidence discovered in the search. Further, Bridges still waited six months before
seeking leave to file the late motion. Months of unexplained delay do not support a
finding of good cause. See Jackson, 5 F.4th at 682.
Bridges next argues that it was impossible for him to comply with the district
court’s January 2020 deadline for pretrial motions because the government did not
produce the affidavit and search warrant in discovery until October 2021. Therefore,
Bridges says, the court should not have held that earlier deadline against him. But this
argument misconstrues the court’s reasoning. The court did not determine that he
lacked good cause simply because the motion was filed after the January 2020 deadline.
Instead, the court concluded that Bridges did not have good cause to file a motion to
suppress in October 2022 because he had all the information required to file that motion
by October 2021.
That conclusion was not an abuse of discretion. When considering a staleness
argument like the one that Bridges wanted to make, the relevant question is whether
the inculpatory information was too stale to establish probable cause when the warrant
was issued or when it was executed. See United States v. Mitten, 592 F.3d 767, 775
(7th Cir. 2010). Bridges concedes that, by October 2021, he knew that the inculpatory
information in the affidavit was from November 1 or earlier, and that the warrant was
executed on November 8. But he does not attempt to justify the yearlong delay that
followed; nowhere does he claim to have “good cause” for the delay that occurred after
October 2021. Instead, he insists that the district court had to grant his motion for
leave—irrespective of good cause—because the court accepted late filings from the
government.
That leads into Bridges’s fourth argument: that the district court unevenly
enforced deadlines by letting the government, but not him, make late filings. Bridges
says that the court owed him equal leeway. Indeed, he says that his whole appeal comes
down to this “principal error.”
Bridges’s argument that the court unfairly allowed the government to belatedly
disclose the evidence it sought to introduce under Rule 404(b) is unpersuasive because
the government’s Rule 404(b) notice was not untimely. The deadline, four business days
before the final pretrial conference, was tied to the dates of trial and the final pretrial
conference. And because the trial and pretrial conference dates kept moving, the
government’s deadline moved also. On January 14, 2022, more than four business days
before the pretrial conference then scheduled for January 30, the government timely
designated as Rule 404(b) evidence text messages recovered from Bridges’s phone that

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showed his drug dealing activity. At a later status conference, the court ordered the
government to identify specific messages, try to reach an agreement with Bridges about
admitting those messages, and explain why any contested messages were admissible.
The court ordered a status update by the end of the week, which the government
supplied. Then the trial date moved twice more, and the final pretrial conference was
rescheduled for October 13. The government’s deadline thus became October 6 (or
October 7, according to Bridges). But on October 4, before the deadline passed, the court
changed the deadline sua sponte and ordered the government to file its Rule 404(b)
evidence by October 11. The government complied. Nowhere in this sequence is a
missed deadline.
Bridges takes issue with the government’s nine-month delay between its status
update in January 2022 and its identification of the text messages in October 2022 as
well as the court’s unprompted extension of the government’s deadline until two days
before the final pretrial conference. Bridges compares the government’s nine-month
delay to his yearlong delay in filing a motion to suppress, but that comparison is inapt
because the government complied with the court’s disclosure schedule and subsequent
scheduling orders. As for the unsolicited extension of the government’s deadline until
after the three-day weekend, that was an exercise of the court’s “considerable
discretion” over case management. See Stevens v. U.S. Dep't of State, 20 F.4th 337, 341
(7th Cir. 2021) (quoting Keeton v. Morningstar, Inc., 667 F.3d 877, 884 (7th Cir. 2012)).
Bridges also argues that the government’s deadline for 404(b) evidence and his
deadline for pretrial motions are interrelated, and the court could have resolved both
motions before his trial. But under our heavily deferential standard of review, he cannot
prevail. Further, Bridges unreasonably looks to a single unfavorable decision in
accusing the district court of unfairness. The “record as a whole” shows that the court
was indulgent of Bridges when it came to extensions of time, most notably the
continuances of the trial date. See Blue v. Hartford Life & Accident Ins. Co., 698 F.3d 587,
595 (7th Cir. 2012). Had Bridges ever asked the court for an extension of the deadline for
pretrial motions, perhaps the court would have been similarly indulgent of that request.
But Bridges did not seek such an extension until he filed his motion nearly a year after
he had the information needed to file the motion and more than two years after the
deadline had passed. The district court did not abuse its discretion in finding no good
cause to accept the untimely motion.
AFFIRMED

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