## Facts

- A law enforcement officer lawfully stopped Roy Adrin Hoggard II for speeding.
- The officer requested permission to search the vehicle; Hoggard consented and suggested starting with the trunk, which he opened.
- In the trunk, the officer saw a small safe and asked to look inside; Hoggard consented and opened the safe himself.
- As the safe opened, Hoggard said “wait a minute” and mentioned pictures of his wife were inside.
- The officer replied he was “not looking for any pictures,” only “contraband”; Hoggard then said “Okay.”
- The officer examined the safe’s contents and found photographs depicting sexually explicit conduct involving children, including images of Hoggard’s wife engaging in sex acts with the couple’s small children.
- Hoggard was charged and, after a jury trial, convicted on eight counts of permitting minors to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing a visual depiction, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2251(b) and 18 U.S.C. § 2.
- The district court denied Hoggard’s motion to suppress the photographs and sentenced him to 360 months’ imprisonment and three years’ supervised release.

## Issues

1. Whether the Fourth Amendment required suppression because Hoggard’s consent to search the safe was not knowing and voluntary due to the officer’s statement that he was looking for “contraband,” not “pictures.”
2. Whether the district court erred in instructing the jury on voluntariness and scope of consent to search.

## Decision

- The Eighth Circuit affirmed the convictions and sentence.
- The court held the safe search was lawful because Hoggard voluntarily consented and no coercion was involved.
- The court held the officer’s statement did not render the consent unknowing or involuntary and did not require the officer to ignore illegal photographs discovered during the consent search.
- The court found no reversible error in the jury instructions concerning consent.

## Legal Principles

- Consent searches are valid under the Fourth Amendment when consent is voluntary under the totality of the circumstances.
- Voluntariness is not defeated by a defendant’s subjective misunderstanding about what evidence may be discovered, absent coercion or improper police conduct that vitiates consent.
- The scope of consent is assessed by objective reasonableness based on the exchange between the officer and the suspect.
- During a lawful consent search, an officer may seize illegal items discovered while acting within the scope of the consent; an officer’s statement about searching for “contraband” does not bar seizure of illegal photographs reasonably treated as contraband.

## Conclusion

The Eighth Circuit upheld the denial of suppression and affirmed Hoggard’s convictions and sentence, concluding that his affirmative, uncoerced consent to open the trunk and safe authorized the search and permitted seizure of child pornography photographs found while the officer searched for “contraband,” and that the jury was properly instructed on consent.


United States v. Hoggard, 254 F.3d 744 (8th Cir. 2001)