Court Affirms Conviction for Maintaining Drug House

US v. Hicks: A confidential informant told police that Hicks was selling drugs out of his North Carolina home. Two controlled buys were made from Hicks, which were followed by the execution of a search warrant that uncovered drugs, cash, and ammunition in the house as well as two guns in a car parked on the property. Hicks was charged, and eventually convicted, on numerous drug and firearm charges, including a count of maintaining a place for the purpose of distribution a controlled substance (he was acquitted of possessing a firearm in connection with a drug trafficking crime). He was sentenced to concurrent terms of 108 months in prison on each count of conviction.

On appeal, the Fourth Circuit affirmed Hicks’ convictions and sentence. As the court stated, it “calendared this case for oral argument primarily to consider Hicks’ challenge to his conviction for maintaining a place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using a controlled substance.” The court agreed that “a defendant’s drug related purpose need not be his sole purpose for maintaining his property,” but that it “must be one of the defendant’s specific purposes for maintaining the property and not merely incidental to some other purpose.” The court recognized that some courts required that the drug related purpose be “one of the primary or principal uses,” at least “in the residential context,” while others required that purpose to be a “significant or important” reason for maintaining the property. Ultimately, the court concluded it didn’t need to decide one way or the other, as the evidence was sufficient to support Hicks’ conviction either way. That the evidence “suggested Hicks had multiple purposes for the residence” that “does not undercut the sufficiency of this evidence to prove that drug distribution was one specific purpose for which Hicks maintained the residence.” The court also found there was sufficient evidence to support Hicks’ other convictions and that the district court did not err in denying his motion to suppress the evidence collected pursuant to the search warrant.