FILED United States Court of Appeals PUBLISH Tenth Circuit UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS June 8, 2020 Christopher M. Wolpert FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT Clerk of Court _________________________________ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff - Appellant, v. No. 19-5059 JULIAN TRUJILLO MORALES, Defendant - Appellee. _________________________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma (D.C. No. 4:19-CR-00066-CVE-1) _________________________________ Thomas E. Duncombe, Assistant United States Attorney, (R. Trent Shores, United States Attorney, with him on the briefs), United States Department of Justice, Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the Plaintiff – Appellant. Barry L. Derryberry, Assistant Federal Public Defender (Julia L. O’Connell, Federal Public Defender, Barbara L. Woltz, Research and Writing Specialist, and William Widell, Assistant Federal Public Defenders, with him on the brief), Office of the Federal Public Defender, Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the Defendant – Appellee. _________________________________ Before TYMKOVICH, Chief Judge, BRISCOE, and MATHESON, Circuit Judges. _________________________________ MATHESON, Circuit Judge. _________________________________ The district court granted Defendant-Appellee Julian Trujillo Morales’s motion to suppress 4.11 kilograms of methamphetamine. The Government appeals. Thirty-two minutes after he was stopped for a traffic violation, Mr. Morales and his passenger consented to an officer’s search of the car that yielded the methamphetamine. During the first 10 minutes after the stop, the officer questioned Mr. Morales and developed reasonable suspicion of drug trafficking. He next questioned Mr. Morales’s passenger for seven minutes and then called the El Paso Intelligence Center (“EPIC”), a national law enforcement database, which took another 15 minutes. The district court said that the officer’s actions were reasonable up to the EPIC call, but the EPIC call unreasonably prolonged the detention. Exercising jurisdiction under 18 U.S.C. § 3731, we reverse. I. BACKGROUND A. Factual Background1 Initial Traffic Stop (Minutes 1 to 10) At around 1 a.m. on March 9, 2019, Officer Mitchell Phillips of the Pryor Police Department stopped a Toyota driven by Mr. Morales on an interstate highway for activating fog lamps in violation of 47 Okla. Stat. Ann. § 12-217.2 Officer Phillips asked Mr. Morales and Victor Ybarra Robles, the sole passenger, for their driver’s licenses and proof of insurance. When they produced the licenses but not proof of insurance, Officer Phillips told them he would search the Oklahoma Law Enforcement Telecommunications 1 The factual background draws on Officer Phillips’s testimony at the suppression hearing and his body camera video, cited as “Vid. at x:xx-xx.” 2 The Oklahoma statute provides that fog lamps “shall only be used when visibility . . . is limited to one-half (1/2) mile or less.” 47 Okla. Stat. Ann. § 12-217(D)(1). 2 System (“OLETS”) through his in-cruiser computer system. OLETS provides individuals’ “address[es], descriptions, their driving license status, their names, identifiers, and occasionally if they have . . . warrants.” App. at 133. Officer Phillips brought Mr. Morales to the police cruiser for questioning and began running the OLETS search. Mr. Morales said that he and Mr. Robles owned a cleaning company and were driving to Springfield, Missouri for work. He provided inconsistent answers about whether ...
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