No Seizure Without Acquiescence to Authority (Reasonable Suspicion Supported Anyway)

US v. Cloud: Officers were patrolling a high-crime area when they spotted a red Dodge Avenger, with four people inside, sitting outside Room 110 of a nearby motel. The officers parked their car behind the Dodge, in a way that left no “clear path for the car’s driver to back out of the parking spot.” An officer, both in uniform, went to either side of the Dodge. One saw the driver’s side rear passenger “holding what I believed to be . . .a firearm.” The person in the seat, when the officer shined his flashlight inside, acted “really nervous” and attempted to conceal the firearm.

While those conversations were taking place, Cloud and his girlfriend emerged from Room 110. He told officers he was not staying at the motel, indicated that the front seat passenger of the Dodge was his daughter, then got in the driver’s seat of the car and “turned his head and acted like he wanted to back out.” Nonetheless, he did not try and back out. The officer on the driver’s side then asked the passenger whey he put under the seat, to which the passenger he had dropped a cigarillo. When he asked Cloud if there were any drugs or guns in the car, Could said there were not. As other officers arrived, Could got out of the car, began “pacing up and down the sidewalk” outside the motel and called his mother. An officer asked him to “come back” and “hang out” with the officers, but Cloud did not. Eventually, all of the passengers in the car got out and were “paired with an officer.”

An officer tried to explain to Cloud why they were there, but Cloud “refused to listen and instead handed [the officer] his phone and asked [the officer] to speak with his mother.” The officer took the phone, briefly, but never talked to Cloud’s mother before returning it. Cloud started talking on the phone again, at which point he “walked towards, and eventually past” the officer. Cloud denied permission to search the car, but an officer “frisked” it anyway, finding the firearm in the floor of the backseat. Cloud was then detained, after a struggle, and was found to be in possession of a separate stolen firearm. That firearm formed the basis of Cloud’s conviction for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

The Fourth Circuit affirmed Cloud’s conviction, holding that the district court had correctly denied his motion to suppress the firearm found after he was detained. The court agreed that Cloud never acquiesced to the shows of authority the officers made and, therefore, the Fourth Amendment was not implicated. The parking of the car, though it effectively blocked the Dodge from leaving, was “of no constitutional significance” to Cloud because it occurred while he was still inside Room 110. However, once Cloud was in the car and being questioned without a real option to leave, that could have been a seizure, had Cloud acquiesced to the officers’ authority. But he did not, as his merely “remaining in the vicinity of the motel and answering their questions” was not enough. Alternately, the court held that even if Cloud was seized earlier in the encounter, officers had reasonable suspicion to support a seizure.