Wiretap Application was More Than Minimally Adequate to Justify the Authorization of a Wiretap
United States of America v. Hugo Santana-Dones
United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
920 F.3d 70 (1st Cir. 2019)
Decided on March 29, 2019
Federal Appeals Lawyer in the First Circuit Court of Appeals
Massachusetts Federal Appeals Lawyer
ISSUE:
Whether the district court erred in concluding that the court which issued the wiretap warrant could have found the facts in the application to be at least minimally adequate to support the a wiretap warrant and whether any reasonable view of the evidence supports the district court’s finding under both Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and the Fourth Amendment.
Federal Criminal Appeals After Trial
HOLDING:
The Court held that the wiretap application, read in tandem with its supporting affidavit, was more than minimally adequate to justify the authorization of a wiretap because the Court’s inquiry is guided by Title III. Title III provides a comprehensive scheme for the regulation of electronic surveillance, prohibiting all secret interception of communications except as authorized by certain state and federal judges in response to applications from specified federal and state law enforcement officials.
FACTS OF THE CASE:
Following several other methods of investigation and surveillance, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents then went a step further and made use of a wiretap of Vasquez’s cellular telephone, which had been authorized and periodically renewed by a federal district judge. A month later, a federal grand jury in the District of Massachusetts charged all defendants on multiple counts of distributing heroin and cocaine under 21 U.S.C. §§ 841 (a)(1) and 846. After maintaining their innocence for an extended period of time, the defendants pleaded guilty to all the charges, reversing the right to challenge the district court’s suppression-related rulings and to claim ineffective assistance of counsel.
Federal Appeals: Drug Convictions and Conspiracy to Distribute
COURT’S ANALYSIS:
The First Circuit Court of Appeals held that the wiretap application, read in tandem with its supporting affidavit, was more than minimally adequate to justify the authorization of a wiretap. When examining a district court’s ruling on a motion to suppress wiretap evidence, this Court reviews its factual findings for clear error and its legal conclusions de novo. To find clear error, the Court must form a strong, unyielding belief, based on the whole of the record, that a mistake has been made. In this instance, the Court’s inquiry is guided by Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2522, which governs the rules for federal telephone wiretaps. Title III provides a comprehensive scheme for the regulation of electronic surveillance, prohibiting all secret interception of communications except as authorized by certain state and federal judges in response to applications from specified federal and state law enforcement officials.
The law’s main purposes: (1) protecting the privacy of wire and oral communications, and (2) delineating on a uniform basis the circumstances and conditions under which the interception of wire and oral communications may be authorized. It follows that wiretapping is an exception, not a rule. The law imposes a set of statutory requirements on top of the constitutional requirements applicable to ordinary search warrants. A wiretap application must contain, in addition to the foundational showing of probable cause, a full and complete statement as to whether or not other investigative procedures have been tried and failed or why they reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed if tried or to be too dangerous. Necessity must, therefore, be viewed through the lens of what is pragmatic and achievable in the real world. Since drug trafficking is inherently difficult to detect and presents formidable problems in pinning down the participants and defining their roles, investigative personnel must be accorded some latitude in choosing their approaches.
Federal Appeals of Firearm Convictions: 18 U.S.C. §§ 921, 922, 924
The Supreme Court has warned that a wiretap is not to be routinely employed as the initial step in criminal investigation. A reviewing court must examine whether reasonable procedures were attempted, or at least thoroughly considered, prior to seeking a wiretap. The inquiry into whether the government has sufficiently demonstrated necessity does not hinge on whether it already has garnered enough goods to pursue criminal prosecution. After all, an application for a wiretap will always have to disclose some meaningful level of previous success in order to satisfy the probable cause requirement and justify further investigation. To be sure, the level of success achieved through a given procedure will vary in relation to the scope of the investigation as established by the government. It follows that, in seeking a wiretap, the government cannot be permitted to set out goals that are either unrealistic or overly expansive.
In this case, the defendants argue that the government made a Gadarene rush to employ electronic surveillance and that its attempt to show necessity in the affidavits supporting the warrant were unconvincing. The First Circuit found that the affidavit was sufficient to allay reasonable concern that the wiretap was being sought prematurely. It demonstrated that the government had employed and exhausted a number of traditional investigative measures over the course of more than six months.