United States v. Daniel Thomas

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding a defendant who left his gym bag on the floor of a public hallway in an apartment building and walked down the stairs surrendered his expectation of privacy
• noting that abandoned property analysis for Fourth Amendment purposes requires an inquiry into “the intent of the person who is alleged to have abandoned” the property, inferred from “words spoken, acts done, and other objective facts.”
• defendant’s ability to retrieve gym bag left in public hallway depended on fortuity that other persons left it undisturbed
• “[I]t is possible for a person to retain a property interest in an item, but nonetheless to relinquish his or her reasonable expectation of privacy in the object.”
• defendant’s acts of fleeing with a gym bag into an apartment building upon seeing police, leaving bag on the floor in a public hallway of building and walking away from bag constituted abandonment
• “When individuals voluntarily abandon property, they forfeit any expectation of privacy in it that they might have had.” (quoting United States v. Jones, 707 F.2d 1169, 1172 (10th Cir. 1983))

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).