Summaries of Selected Opinions
| Publication year | 2015 |
| Pages | 135 |
| Citation | Vol. 44 No. 10 Pg. 135 |
From the Courts
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
Summaries of Selected Opinions
Summaries of selected Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals Opinions appear on a space-available basis. The summaries are prepared for the Colorado Bar Association (CBA) by Katherine Campbell and Frank Gibbard, licensed Colorado attorneys. They are provided as a service by the CBA and are not the official language of this Court. The CBA cannot guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the summaries. Full copies of the Tenth Circuit decisions are accessible from the CBA website: www.cobar.org (click on "Opinions/Rules /Statutes").
No. 14-1296. United States v. Sanders. 08/07/2015. D.Colo. Judge Lucero. Warrantless Seizure of Vehicle—Community-Caretaking Rationale.
After the district court granted a motion to suppress contraband found in defendant's vehicle, the government appealed. Aurora police found defendant's vehicle parked in the lot of a Goodwill store. They had been looking for defendant because she had an outstanding warrant. After defendant and a companion exited the store and walked to the car, officers ordered them to the ground and arrested defendant. The police initially declined to release the car to defendant's companion because he did not have a valid driver's license. Then, he too was arrested after police found what appeared to be heroin near the location where he had been ordered to the ground. Out of fear that defendant's car might be broken into because it was parked in a high-crime area, the police had it impounded and towed. While conducting an inventory search of the car, police located drugs, for which defendant was later indicted. The district court granted her motion to suppress the drugs because the police had impounded the car for reasons not listed in the city of Aurora's impound policy.
On appeal, the government asserted that the impoundment of the vehicle satisfied Fourth Amendment requirements because the seizure was justified by the community-caretaking exception to the warrant requirement. However, a discretionary impoundment of a vehicle on community caretaking grounds is permissible only where officers exercise it according to standardized criteria, not in bad faith or for the sole purpose of investigation. Where the vehicle is located on private property that is neither obstructing traffic nor creating an imminent threat to public safety, its impoundment is...
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