[00:00:00] Speaker 00: Good morning. [00:00:01] Speaker 00: We have four cases this morning for oral argument. [00:00:05] Speaker 00: We're going to take a break after, probably after the third one, but maybe after the two. [00:00:09] Speaker 00: We'll see how it goes. [00:00:11] Speaker 00: With me today is Judge Carson from New Mexico, Judge Federico from Kansas. [00:00:17] Speaker 00: So we're well represented around the circuit today. [00:00:20] Speaker 00: Is that council ready? [00:00:23] Speaker 00: So let's get started. [00:00:24] Speaker 00: The first case is 24-1088 United States versus Judkins, Mr. [00:00:43] Speaker 01: Good morning, Your Honors. [00:00:44] Speaker 01: Thank you. [00:00:45] Speaker 01: May it please the Court. [00:00:45] Speaker 01: My name is Jason Wassocki, and I represent Appellant Mr. Judkins today. [00:00:52] Speaker 01: This case presents several issues, but I would like to discuss with this Court the Fourth Amendment violation that necessitates reversal. [00:01:02] Speaker 01: Specifically, I'd like to discuss the unconstitutional over-broad search of Mr. Judkins' cell phone based on a warrant that lacked sufficient particularity. [00:01:14] Speaker 01: The warrant in this case has no bounds when it comes to Mr. Judjkin's cell phone. [00:01:20] Speaker 01: It allowed the government to search and seize every single bit of his personal life. [00:01:28] Speaker 01: And as the Supreme Court recognized in Riley, cell phones are unique. [00:01:34] Speaker 01: They are unique in every way. [00:01:37] Speaker 01: There is nothing else in this world that keeps better track of our most personal and intimate life than a computer we carry around in our pocket, recording all of our moments via photographs, all of our steps via pedometer, and all of our location via GPS. [00:01:57] Speaker 01: It contains all of our banking information. [00:02:00] Speaker 01: These are not things that the court is unfamiliar with. [00:02:03] Speaker 01: What it does require is it requires the police and the government to do the hard work of policing. [00:02:10] Speaker 01: And it is hard work. [00:02:12] Speaker 01: The hard work of policing can be simply shortcut by seizing somebody's cell phone and rummaging through it generally to find every potential possible little bit of data that might support bringing a criminal charge. [00:02:27] Speaker 01: Now in this case Mr. Judskins was not charged with a conspiracy, which is critical. [00:02:32] Speaker 01: He was charged with [00:02:33] Speaker 01: possession with intent to distribute marijuana, methamphetamine, and possession of a weapon in furtherance of a drug crime. [00:02:42] Speaker 01: Now, what the government was able to do is create and manufacture a prosecution based entirely on one piece of evidence. [00:02:52] Speaker 01: That was his cell phone. [00:02:53] Speaker 01: The government did not limit their search of the cell phone to anything. [00:02:59] Speaker 01: While the warrant and the affidavit in this case has lots of polysyllabic words, ultimately, when you look at the warrant itself, it is clear that there is nothing that is off limits to the government. [00:03:14] Speaker 00: Don't our cases suggest, though, that if the application for the warrant specifically lists the crimes that they're trying to research, investigate, [00:03:29] Speaker 00: But that does supply some particularity. [00:03:34] Speaker 00: And the warrant here did say, we're looking for these crimes. [00:03:41] Speaker 00: In addition to the cell phone, there was other evidence of drug distribution, the gun and the drugs in the car. [00:03:52] Speaker 00: Don't our cases suggest that enough? [00:03:55] Speaker 00: And if they don't suggest that that's enough particularity, what's our best case that we could use to support your theory of the case? [00:04:04] Speaker 01: Yeah, sure. [00:04:05] Speaker 01: So yes, this circuit's case law does say that if the affiant of the warrant [00:04:12] Speaker 01: sort of mutters abracadabra in the warrant, that creates sufficient particularity, the abracadabra obviously being the subject offenses in this case or human trafficking, for example, in the Burgess case. [00:04:23] Speaker 00: But they also said, we want to look for photos of his potential accomplices' text emails. [00:04:31] Speaker 00: I mean, it does list some of the parts of the computer that they were particularly interested in. [00:04:40] Speaker 01: Yes, but the way that the affidavit works in all practicality is that, and as the affidavit actually says in paragraph 15 of it, is that what the officer is going to do is he's going to look at everything. [00:04:52] Speaker 01: Because he doesn't know if it's going to be particularly relevant or useful until he looks at everything. [00:04:58] Speaker 01: In fact, he says something to the effect of a piece of information or a photo may not be relevant immediately until I look at every other photo to see if maybe it fits into a larger picture. [00:05:09] Speaker 01: And I think this court's opinion in Laura 923 of 3rd 907, which really articulates perhaps what the kernel or the core of the truth here is. [00:05:23] Speaker 01: And that is, it is the how and not the where, right? [00:05:28] Speaker 01: How the government goes about looking into our most intimate and personal information [00:05:34] Speaker 01: is what matters. [00:05:35] Speaker 04: Well, Counsel, can I ask you about that? [00:05:36] Speaker 04: Yes. [00:05:37] Speaker 04: I would agree that our recent cases discuss the importance of looking at how the search is conducted or the scope and manner of the search. [00:05:46] Speaker 04: The government says you waived that argument, though, because you didn't fully brief it. [00:05:49] Speaker 04: In fact, your focus was primarily in your particularity argument about the what that they were going to search. [00:05:55] Speaker 04: So what's your response to the government that that argument isn't waived? [00:05:58] Speaker 01: Well, it's not way because they're all part of the singular idea, which is particularity. [00:06:05] Speaker 01: The warrant has to be particular in what, where, how it's looking for this intimate personal data. [00:06:12] Speaker 04: Your argument on appeal also have to be focused on specific arguments that attack the particularity or the lack thereof. [00:06:20] Speaker 01: Yes, and it does. [00:06:22] Speaker 01: As we articulate in both our opening and reply brief, the warrant itself, particularly the affidavit, [00:06:27] Speaker 01: has no parameters on where or how it's going to look for data. [00:06:32] Speaker 01: What it does is it says, I'm going to look at everything, I'm going to seize everything, I'm going to search everything, and then I'm going to figure out after the fact whether or not it was relevant. [00:06:42] Speaker 01: And it's this after the fact analysis that is particularly problematic in the Fourth Amendment. [00:06:48] Speaker 01: Because the Fourth Amendment requires that the warrant at the outset must be particular. [00:06:54] Speaker 01: Here, what we're engaging in in this digital era is a post hoc rationalization of an examination of whether or not the warrant was sufficiently particular after all the information has already been searched and already been seized. [00:07:11] Speaker 01: That's the cart before the horse. [00:07:13] Speaker 01: You have to have the particularity before you even go look. [00:07:17] Speaker 01: Well, now you're right about all that, too. [00:07:19] Speaker 01: Why doesn't good faith apply? [00:07:21] Speaker 01: Why doesn't good faith apply? [00:07:22] Speaker 01: Yes. [00:07:24] Speaker 01: for the exact same reason, Your Honor, and that is that no police officer, in this case an ATF agent, should be able to say that it is reasonable for me to look at every single thing on somebody's cell phone, because that's what this warrant and every other warrant like it authorizes, and say that, well, it's good faith. [00:07:44] Speaker 01: And what ends up happening is we have a situation where, well, a magistrate approves the warrant, and that creates the good faith exception. [00:07:53] Speaker 01: That is a prime example of the exception swallowing the rule. [00:07:58] Speaker 01: If all an officer has to do to have a warrant pass constitutional muster is to say, I'm going to search for basically everything in the cell phone, fancy language, fancy language, related to the subject offenses, and then the magistrate grants that warrant, well, then every single time [00:08:17] Speaker 01: The good faith exception is going to apply. [00:08:19] Speaker 01: That's not what an exception is. [00:08:21] Speaker 02: I mean, don't you think one of the problems you have, though, is, like, I'm just looking at my phone here. [00:08:26] Speaker 02: And they listed a bunch of different things they wanted to look. [00:08:29] Speaker 02: And it sounded like they were looking at the whole phone. [00:08:31] Speaker 02: Yes. [00:08:33] Speaker 02: The calendar, the text messages, the camera. [00:08:37] Speaker 00: Be careful I can see all that. [00:08:40] Speaker 02: There are no secrets being displayed here. [00:08:44] Speaker 02: Reminders. [00:08:47] Speaker 02: Files, emails, phone calls, those are all, I mean, that encompasses most of the information on my phone. [00:08:59] Speaker 02: And they listed them all, and they're all arguably relevant in an investigation of a drug crime. [00:09:07] Speaker 01: You may be right, your honor, but what is important here is that the government has to do more than just simply arrest somebody, seize their cell phone, [00:09:16] Speaker 01: and then use that as the sole basis on which to create a conviction. [00:09:21] Speaker 02: Well, they didn't. [00:09:22] Speaker 02: He arrested them. [00:09:24] Speaker 02: They found more than just cell phones. [00:09:26] Speaker 02: They found scales, cash, some drugs. [00:09:32] Speaker 02: Didn't they? [00:09:33] Speaker 02: They did. [00:09:33] Speaker 02: And doesn't that give them something? [00:09:36] Speaker 02: Then they say, well, gosh, this guy appears to be a drug dealer. [00:09:39] Speaker 02: And so we want to look at his phones. [00:09:41] Speaker 02: We want to look at his notes, his messages, his files, his pictures to corroborate this. [00:09:47] Speaker 01: Yes. [00:09:48] Speaker 01: And what the police easily and frankly should have done in order to comply with the Fourth Amendment is limited their search of the phone to very specific information about what they found in the car and how it would relate. [00:10:01] Speaker 01: So for example, I don't know if your honors are familiar with Google Photos. [00:10:06] Speaker 01: Most of us store our photos in Amazon, Google, or even on our phone. [00:10:09] Speaker 01: And you can do a search for things like cars or guns or drugs. [00:10:13] Speaker 01: And it will return specific photos related to that search data. [00:10:18] Speaker 01: Have that search come up. [00:10:19] Speaker 01: OK, well, now I'm looking at a photo of a gun, for example, which doesn't exist in this case. [00:10:24] Speaker 01: How about text messages? [00:10:25] Speaker 01: Well, the government is very familiar with experts who talk about the coded language in which drug dealers communicate. [00:10:33] Speaker 01: Snowflake emojis. [00:10:35] Speaker 01: Talking about trees. [00:10:36] Speaker 01: Do searches for those. [00:10:38] Speaker 01: And then if they find that information, use that to support it. [00:10:42] Speaker 01: For the gun charge, as I argued in the brief, the court could have used the information that it gathered to go and knock on doors and talk to the people who bought from Mr. Juggins and say, hey, did he bring a gun to this transaction? [00:10:58] Speaker 01: Well, now you have a really good argument, if you're the prosecution, for the gun and furtherance of the possession and distribution. [00:11:06] Speaker 01: They didn't do that. [00:11:07] Speaker 01: They took the easy road. [00:11:08] Speaker 01: And it is this branch's job to make sure that the executive branch does its job, which is to do the hard work of policing and not take the easy route. [00:11:19] Speaker 04: Well, how is this different than police getting a search warrant to search someone's house? [00:11:22] Speaker 04: They don't know where the relevant evidence or contraband may be in the house. [00:11:26] Speaker 04: They don't go to the magistrate judge and say, we only want to go to the kitchen and look in this drawer because we think that may be where the drugs are located. [00:11:34] Speaker 04: How is this any different than going in and searching the whole house and here, attachment B, [00:11:38] Speaker 04: to the warrant, they said to the magistrate, we're going to essentially do a phone dump and then we'll have all the data, but all that we're looking for is this, items that are listed in attachment B. That's what we're going to seize. [00:11:49] Speaker 04: And the manner in which we do that is we're going to have to look at everything, but ultimately what's going to be seized for potential evidence is this. [00:11:56] Speaker 04: How is that any different than going in to search a whole house? [00:11:59] Speaker 01: Your Honor, it's radically different. [00:12:02] Speaker 01: If the cops come in and search my whole house, [00:12:05] Speaker 01: and I don't have my photo albums in my house because I keep my photo albums in a storage unit, or I keep them at my mom's house, or I keep them at my mistress's house. [00:12:15] Speaker 01: That information is never going to be seen by the government. [00:12:19] Speaker 01: So yes, they can go in and let's say they're looking for a gun or drugs in my house, and they rummage through my house, and they don't find any of those things because I don't keep them there. [00:12:30] Speaker 01: With a cell phone, everything is there, everything. [00:12:33] Speaker 01: And in this warrant, [00:12:35] Speaker 01: They don't just ask to search and seize information within the hard drive of the cell phone. [00:12:40] Speaker 01: They say, well, there's accounts, and we're going to access the accounts that are within the cloud or a banking application. [00:12:46] Speaker 01: So now you are in a completely unlimited search because now you're not just searching what's on the phone, maybe physical storage, maybe even my personal iCloud storage, right? [00:12:58] Speaker 01: You are now searching [00:13:00] Speaker 01: you know, Chase Bank and all of the accounts on Chase Bank's website that happen to be accessed through the cell phone. [00:13:07] Speaker 01: And on and on and on. [00:13:09] Speaker 01: Every single application, Your Honor, no longer is a physically stored piece of information. [00:13:15] Speaker 01: It is accessed through the cloud. [00:13:16] Speaker 01: So cell phones are different, basically. [00:13:19] Speaker 01: Not only are they different, Your Honor, as I think the Supreme Court recognized in Riley, is they are completely unique. [00:13:27] Speaker 01: And the foundation upon which [00:13:29] Speaker 01: Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has been built. [00:13:32] Speaker 01: Physical searches simply does not apply here. [00:13:35] Speaker 00: Every time we try and analyze it, it doesn't work. [00:13:37] Speaker 00: You mentioned that if the government had supplied a date range, that might have been enough to supply sufficient specificity. [00:13:46] Speaker 00: Why would a date range solve the problems that you're talking about? [00:13:52] Speaker 01: Sure. [00:13:53] Speaker 01: In this case, Your Honor, it solves the problem because all the police knew [00:13:58] Speaker 01: was that Mr. Judkins had been driving around for a day. [00:14:00] Speaker 01: They didn't see any drug deals. [00:14:03] Speaker 01: And that he had a warrant for, I think, eluding up in Adams County, which was ultimately dismissed. [00:14:09] Speaker 01: So they have no information before they pin his car against the wall and search the car of actual any drug activity. [00:14:17] Speaker 01: So they know based on the items in the car that he's got about $1,000 in cash, a little bit of marijuana, and a little bit of methamphetamine. [00:14:27] Speaker 01: They could search based on a date range of one or two days prior, that day and the day prior, and then build their case from there. [00:14:37] Speaker 01: Instead, what they did, again, they shortened it. [00:14:39] Speaker 02: How many warrants do you want them to get? [00:14:41] Speaker 02: They get a warrant limited to two days, then do they have to go back and get an additional week? [00:14:51] Speaker 02: and just keep chipping away at it like that in your mind? [00:14:54] Speaker 01: The short answer is, Your Honor, yes. [00:14:56] Speaker 01: To analogize maybe to the Burgess case. [00:14:59] Speaker 01: So in the Burgess case, they take this guy's hard drive from an RV, and they search it, and they find some child pornography. [00:15:09] Speaker 01: And then they go and get a warrant for that information. [00:15:12] Speaker 01: Here, they could have had a gun, done the hard police work, [00:15:16] Speaker 01: Knocked on the door of a customer and said, have you ever bought from this guy before? [00:15:19] Speaker 01: Yes. [00:15:20] Speaker 01: How many times? [00:15:20] Speaker 01: Weekly. [00:15:21] Speaker 01: Boom. [00:15:22] Speaker 01: Now go get a warrant to search for a longer period of time. [00:15:25] Speaker 01: I would like to reserve the remaining 15 seconds. [00:15:29] Speaker 01: Thank you. [00:15:32] Speaker 00: Let's hear from Mr. Brenton. [00:15:52] Speaker 03: Good morning, Your Honors. [00:15:53] Speaker 03: May it please the Court, I'm Kyle Brenton on behalf of the United States. [00:15:59] Speaker 03: As my colleague has, I'll focus entirely on the Fourth Amendment issue, unless the Court has questions about the other issues raised in the briefs. [00:16:07] Speaker 00: Actually, on the video evidence, I did get a chance to watch the video. [00:16:15] Speaker 00: It's very entertaining. [00:16:17] Speaker 00: use that as a basis for a factual determination on gang membership? [00:16:22] Speaker 00: Seems a little thin. [00:16:23] Speaker 03: Well, I think, Your Honor, I would make two points on this, because we're talking now about the Court's overruling of Judkins's objection to the finding that he continued to engage in gang activity while on pretrial release. [00:16:36] Speaker 03: First, I think, as we established in our brief, [00:16:38] Speaker 03: The court never returns to this point over the entire course of the sentencing, explains in great detail why he was choosing the sentence he was choosing, never mentions it. [00:16:48] Speaker 03: So I think the clearest answer there is that this was harmless because Judkins hasn't shown how it affected the sentence in any way. [00:16:56] Speaker 00: I think... Well, the court did go to the trouble of overruling the objection. [00:17:01] Speaker 03: He did. [00:17:01] Speaker 03: He certainly did. [00:17:02] Speaker 00: Endorsing that... And that is a decision... [00:17:06] Speaker 03: That is a decision that this court reviews for clear error only. [00:17:10] Speaker 03: So the question then boils down to Judkins makes the decision to record and release these videos in which there's no dispute that he's making gang signs, that he's using gang language. [00:17:23] Speaker 03: There was no argument, no, no, no, those aren't gang signs. [00:17:26] Speaker 03: That's not gang language. [00:17:28] Speaker 03: Um, he's on pretrial release in this case. [00:17:30] Speaker 03: The videos, I mean, if you watch them, your honor, he mentions the judge and the prosecutor by name in these videos. [00:17:36] Speaker 03: You know, the question is, was that some evidence that would allow the court on a clear error standard to make that finding? [00:17:43] Speaker 03: We think the answer to that question is yes. [00:17:45] Speaker 03: Turning to the Fourth Amendment question, the warrant to search Judkins's iPhone was right down the middle of this court's precedent regarding what has to be in a warrant application to satisfy the particularity standard. [00:18:01] Speaker 03: And I want to take us back to what Judge Timkovich's question was, which is this court's precedent. [00:18:08] Speaker 03: And this court has held again and again [00:18:11] Speaker 03: in the context of searches of computers and cell phones, that what is required is that the warrant limits the scope of the search to evidence of specific crimes or specific types of material. [00:18:24] Speaker 03: And that's from Palms, it's from Russian, it's from Otero, it's from Riccardi. [00:18:29] Speaker 03: I mean, there is no doubt that that is what is required. [00:18:34] Speaker 03: And that is what happened here. [00:18:36] Speaker 03: The scope of the warrant is limited to evidence of the subject defenses, which are listed by number and name. [00:18:44] Speaker 03: And it's listed in the warrant application, their drug distribution under 841, possession of a firearm under 924C, and use of a communications facility to further a drug felony under 843B. [00:18:58] Speaker 03: So these are the subject offenses. [00:19:00] Speaker 03: That's what the warrant has to say. [00:19:01] Speaker 03: But I think it's also worth remembering in this case that this was not a, oh, we see a cell phone. [00:19:07] Speaker 03: There might be evidence of drug dealing on it. [00:19:09] Speaker 03: The context in which this phone was found gives rise to a very strong inference that there's going to be evidence of these subject offenses on this phone. [00:19:21] Speaker 03: So to review that scene, the phone is found [00:19:24] Speaker 03: on the ground outside the open driver's seat where Judkins dropped it as he fled from police. [00:19:30] Speaker 03: In the car, there's another phone in the driver's seat, the Motorola phone. [00:19:36] Speaker 03: In the footwell of the car, you have a loaded pistol, a digital scale with drug residue. [00:19:43] Speaker 03: In the console, you have $1,900 in cash subdivided into $100 bindles. [00:19:49] Speaker 03: In the pocket of the driver's side door, you have baggies. [00:19:54] Speaker 03: Elsewhere in the car, you have eight methamphetamine pills and a hundred grams of marijuana subdivided into eight different bags. [00:20:03] Speaker 03: All of this evidence gives rise to a very strong inference that this is not just a car. [00:20:09] Speaker 03: This is a mobile drug distribution business and that these phones are being used to run that business. [00:20:16] Speaker 03: In fact, when you think about the subject defense of use of a communications facility to facilitate a drug felony, [00:20:23] Speaker 03: The phone was the communications facility. [00:20:26] Speaker 03: So limiting the warrant to the subject offenses, that's not empty words, it's not magic words. [00:20:33] Speaker 03: It's really very squarely arises from what was recovered at the scene in terms of physical evidence. [00:20:39] Speaker 04: Counsel, can I ask you though, we have also said a limiting principle must be contained within the warrant and not just the manner of search but what you're looking for. [00:20:49] Speaker 04: and looking for just sort of guardrails. [00:20:51] Speaker 04: And the classic is the open-ended language, we're looking for any and all. [00:20:55] Speaker 04: And we said, well, what are limiting principles that we can discern? [00:20:58] Speaker 04: Let me ask you about one in particular. [00:21:00] Speaker 04: Attachment B, when the affiant was describing the evidence to be seized, it contains in line 16, it says that they want to seize contextual information necessary to understand the evidence described in this attachment. [00:21:15] Speaker 04: Has that language, are you aware whether that's been used in these types of warrants before? [00:21:21] Speaker 04: Because that seems pretty broad to me to say, well, we just want contextual information. [00:21:25] Speaker 04: I mean, that doesn't seem to contain any of those limiting principles, does it? [00:21:29] Speaker 03: Well, I think, Your Honor, first I would say that all of the categories of evidence in Attachment B are limited by the preparatory paragraph at the beginning of Attachment B, which says that we're looking for evidence of these subject offenses. [00:21:44] Speaker 04: Sure. [00:21:45] Speaker 04: Again, I'll spot you that the warrant specifically lists three offenses that you want to find evidence that relate to those offenses. [00:21:51] Speaker 04: And that is certainly one way our precedent has said a warrant can be limited. [00:21:55] Speaker 04: I'm going to the more general sort of guardrail limitation that we just reaffirmed last year in Solace, where we said we also look for limiting principles on these sort of broad, over-sweeping statements that really don't seem to contain any guardrails at all. [00:22:08] Speaker 04: And so that language kind of stuck out to me. [00:22:10] Speaker 04: That's why I was asking about Line 16 in particular and whether that's something that's commonplace that we have affirmed before. [00:22:16] Speaker 03: Well, Your Honor, I am not familiar with a specific case from this court addressing that particular item. [00:22:21] Speaker 03: I mean, this is, I will say, a very standard warrant that is prepared in federal prosecutions. [00:22:27] Speaker 03: It was reviewed by a prosecutor in our office. [00:22:30] Speaker 03: So I have no basis for not saying that it's standard language. [00:22:33] Speaker 03: I'm not aware of the court addressing it specifically. [00:22:36] Speaker 03: I think, though, looking at the affidavit, as Agent Pound describes, [00:22:41] Speaker 03: based on his training and experience of how individuals engaged in drug trafficking use their phones to forward their business, he makes it clear that sometimes pieces of information on a phone in isolation, it's not clear how they may be relevant, but when you look at them in combination with one another, that then the relevance to the subject offenses becomes clear. [00:23:06] Speaker 03: And I think that that [00:23:08] Speaker 03: is what that language is getting at. [00:23:10] Speaker 03: I think it's getting at the necessity of understanding the evidence on this phone as a whole that is relevant to the subject offenses. [00:23:17] Speaker 03: So that's where I would say that that language comes in. [00:23:20] Speaker 03: And I would also point out to the court, and I think that Judge Federico's questions, to my counterpart, go to this. [00:23:28] Speaker 03: There has been no challenge whatsoever to how this search was actually conducted. [00:23:35] Speaker 03: Mr. Judkins below had every opportunity to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, fine. [00:23:40] Speaker 03: It was limited to particularity, but look at what he actually did. [00:23:44] Speaker 03: Look how he actually went to my bank records. [00:23:47] Speaker 03: Look how he actually went to my medical information. [00:23:53] Speaker 03: He had every opportunity to develop evidence that the officers did not abide by the limitations of the warrant, and he chose not to. [00:24:02] Speaker 03: And he didn't make that argument on appeal. [00:24:03] Speaker 03: So I think that this court's review is really limited to this narrow particularity question. [00:24:09] Speaker 03: And finally, I'll turn to the question of good faith. [00:24:12] Speaker 03: Because as I say, this warrant was right down the middle of what this court has told prosecutors and officers over and over again they need to do. [00:24:21] Speaker 03: And I think that the agent here acted in 100% good faith with that approach. [00:24:28] Speaker 03: The warrant was signed and issued by the magistrate judge. [00:24:31] Speaker 03: The same agent, Agent Pound, drafted the application and conducted the search. [00:24:38] Speaker 03: He consulted with an AUSA in preparing the warrant. [00:24:41] Speaker 03: And there's been no allegation from Judkins of anything remotely approaching police misconduct. [00:24:48] Speaker 03: I mean, certainly, Judkins thinks that the investigation should have been done differently than it was. [00:24:53] Speaker 03: But there's no hint that these officers did anything wrong. [00:24:56] Speaker 03: And again, he forwent any opportunity to develop that evidence below. [00:25:01] Speaker 03: First of all, I don't think that there is any issue with the warrant. [00:25:04] Speaker 03: I don't think this court can find one. [00:25:06] Speaker 03: I think it's squarely within this court's precedent. [00:25:08] Speaker 03: Even if it weren't in some small regard, perhaps, as Judge Federico points out, it certainly was executed in good faith. [00:25:16] Speaker 03: So unless the court has any further questions. [00:25:19] Speaker 04: Can I ask you about the 924C conviction? [00:25:21] Speaker 04: Absolutely. [00:25:22] Speaker 04: Do I understand the government's argument here to say that all the items you listed when you stood up here about the baggies, the scale, [00:25:29] Speaker 04: It's all the physical items that are the instrumentalities of the drug trade was sufficient for the jury to conclude that the firearm was possessed in furtherance of rather than the drug quantities themselves, which, as I read the brief, seem to be user quantities, not sort of distributions of quantities. [00:25:47] Speaker 04: Is that an accurate recitation of your position? [00:25:50] Speaker 03: It is, Your Honor. [00:25:51] Speaker 03: I mean, I would say as to the quantities of drugs found in the car, the officers encountered Mr. Judkins at the end of his day. [00:25:59] Speaker 03: He had the money from selling the drugs, but he had sold the drugs. [00:26:03] Speaker 03: So there was 100 grams of marijuana and eight pills of methamphetamine left in the car. [00:26:09] Speaker 03: I think, though, that under Trotter and under King, there's no requirement that there be, there's no threshold that the government has to meet or exceed in order to give rise to sufficient evidence that the gun was used in furtherance of. [00:26:25] Speaker 03: I think all of the Trotter factors are met here [00:26:29] Speaker 03: The type of drug activity, it was, as we say, a mobile drug distribution business. [00:26:35] Speaker 03: He was going door to door to his spires to sell. [00:26:40] Speaker 03: The accessibility of the gun, it was literally between his feet on the floorboards. [00:26:45] Speaker 03: One of the officers testified it was as close to the driver's seat as it could possibly be. [00:26:50] Speaker 03: The type of gun, it was a pistol, which this court has held as one of the, quote, tools of the trade of drug distribution. [00:26:56] Speaker 03: The legal status of the gun. [00:26:58] Speaker 03: He was not barred from possessing it. [00:27:01] Speaker 03: But the evidence at trial was that it was purchased by someone other than Julius Judkins. [00:27:06] Speaker 03: So it was certainly a gray market gun. [00:27:08] Speaker 03: And the experts testified that that's what's commonly used in the drug trade. [00:27:12] Speaker 03: Proximity to drugs and profit. [00:27:14] Speaker 03: It's literally within inches of drug residue of the money from the sales. [00:27:20] Speaker 03: Loaded, yes, round in the chamber. [00:27:24] Speaker 03: In the time and circumstances, he's literally dropped his phone [00:27:28] Speaker 03: while arranging a deal to run and the gun was right between his feet. [00:27:33] Speaker 03: So I think regardless of the amount, the Trotter factors here were unquestionably met. [00:27:38] Speaker 04: In the evidence of what had occurred prior in the day about these transactions, my understanding is that came from the phones and communications more than direct observation by police officers or any type of witnesses who would testify to those transactions was the jury presented evidence of [00:27:56] Speaker 04: the phone communications that would indicate drug trafficking activity that same day? [00:28:01] Speaker 03: Absolutely, Your Honor. [00:28:02] Speaker 03: There are three exhibits. [00:28:04] Speaker 03: I believe it was 38, 39, and 40 at trial. [00:28:07] Speaker 03: Each one of those presents his messages from the phone for 40 is the day of the arrest, 39 is the day before, 38 is the day before that. [00:28:17] Speaker 03: So again, we are only talking about three days worth of evidence that was presented at trial. [00:28:21] Speaker 03: And the government's experts, DEA agents, went through those, said, you know, this is what these words mean. [00:28:30] Speaker 03: You know, this is what beans mean, this is what. [00:28:32] Speaker 03: And it is a litany of deals made in that time. [00:28:38] Speaker 03: If there are no further questions, the government would ask that the conviction be affirmed. [00:28:41] Speaker 00: Thank you, counsel. [00:28:43] Speaker 00: Could you put two minutes on for revival? [00:28:52] Speaker 01: I don't own that much. [00:28:53] Speaker 01: You don't have to use it. [00:28:55] Speaker 01: Just kidding. [00:28:56] Speaker 01: Thank you, Your Honors. [00:28:57] Speaker 01: I appreciate it. [00:28:59] Speaker 01: I would like to address a couple of issues with regard to the discussion with my colleague. [00:29:07] Speaker 01: The dates of the offense for which Mr. Judkins is convicted is a specific date. [00:29:13] Speaker 01: The government has the ability to charge Mr. Judkins with crimes on multiple days. [00:29:19] Speaker 01: a conspiracy going back weeks, months, or years, but they didn't. [00:29:24] Speaker 01: And what we just heard is exactly what we raised in our opening reply brief, that is the problem presented with the search and seizure allowed by this warrant, is that the government obtained and used data to convict my client going back years. [00:29:41] Speaker 01: 2019 is as far back as the data went, and at trial they presented [00:29:47] Speaker 01: at least three days worth of evidence to convict my client for a single day of activity. [00:29:55] Speaker 01: All of it almost begs the question of why is this a federal case in the first place? [00:29:59] Speaker 01: But at the end of the day, at the end of this trial day, what we have is a jury who hears not about a single day of criminal activity, but a many day, almost a week, maybe even implied as much, much more of criminal activity. [00:30:17] Speaker 01: So they're going to get the bad guy. [00:30:19] Speaker 01: And that was the point of the use of this cell phone evidence. [00:30:22] Speaker 01: And when it comes to the firearm and furtherance of possession, again, it is important to understand that if the police are required to do that hard work, that sort of shoe leather work of policing, and they find based on a transaction that [00:30:40] Speaker 01: Mr. Judkins is going to a legal cannabis store, purchasing cannabis, and one of the workers there notices he has a gun. [00:30:50] Speaker 01: Lock, stock, and barrel. [00:30:51] Speaker 01: If one of his customers says, yeah, he always comes, he puts his gun on the table, and that's when we do the deal. [00:30:57] Speaker 01: Lock, stock, and barrel. [00:31:00] Speaker 00: Thank you, Your Honor. [00:31:00] Speaker 00: Your time has expired. [00:31:02] Speaker 00: We appreciate the arguments this morning. [00:31:05] Speaker 00: The case is submitted and before I excuse Council, I want to thank Mr. Rossocki for taking these CJA cases. [00:31:13] Speaker 00: The court appreciates your work on behalf of that program. [00:31:17] Speaker 00: So Council excused.