## Facts

- DEA agents in Oklahoma City investigated James Theodore Wicks using information from an informant, Darryl Skaggs, who agreed to cooperate after his arrest on drug charges.
- Skaggs reported that Wicks regularly traveled between California and Oklahoma on an eight-day cycle, distributing methamphetamine during travel and collecting payment on the return trip.
- Skaggs said Wicks typically stayed in two adjoining rooms at a specific motel while in Oklahoma City and that Wicks had carried a firearm on at least one occasion.
- Agents recorded telephone calls between Skaggs and Wicks; agents interpreted the calls as relating to payment for previously supplied methamphetamine and efforts to obtain a chemical used to manufacture methamphetamine.
- Agents searched Wicks’s motel room pursuant to a warrant and seized evidence, including documents with “recipes” and instructions for manufacturing methamphetamine and crack cocaine.
- A jury convicted Wicks on multiple drug-trafficking and firearms offenses, including felon-in-possession and carrying a firearm in relation to a drug-trafficking crime.
- The district court sentenced Wicks to an aggregate 387 months’ imprisonment, applying the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) enhancement based on three 1963 California armed-robbery convictions.

## Issues

1. Whether the search warrant for Wicks’s motel room was supported by probable cause such that suppression of seized evidence was properly denied.
2. Whether drug-manufacturing “recipes” and related writings seized from the motel room were inadmissible hearsay under Federal Rule of Evidence 801.
3. Whether Wicks was properly sentenced under the ACCA, including whether three 1963 California armed-robbery convictions were valid predicate convictions.

## Decision

- The court affirmed the denial of the motion to suppress, holding that the warrant was supported by probable cause under the totality of the circumstances and that deference was owed to the issuing magistrate.
- The court affirmed admission of the seized writings, concluding they were not hearsay because they were offered as circumstantial evidence of drug activity, not for the truth of any assertions in the documents.
- The court affirmed application of the ACCA enhancement, holding the 1963 guilty pleas were constitutionally valid under the standards applicable at the time and could be used as predicate “violent felony” convictions.
- The court affirmed Wicks’s convictions and the 387-month sentence.

## Legal Principles

- Probable cause for a search warrant is evaluated under a totality-of-the-circumstances approach, and reviewing courts give substantial deference to an issuing magistrate’s determination.
- A writing is hearsay only if it is an out-of-court “statement” offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted; documents offered as circumstantial evidence of involvement in criminal conduct (rather than for assertive truth) are not hearsay.
- For ACCA purposes, prior convictions may serve as predicate offenses if they are constitutionally valid; the validity of older guilty pleas is assessed by the constitutional standards in effect when the pleas were entered, not by later procedural requirements.

## Conclusion

The court held that the motel-room search was supported by probable cause, the drug “recipe” documents were admissible as nonhearsay circumstantial evidence of drug trafficking, and Wicks’s ACCA enhancement was proper because his 1963 robbery pleas were valid under contemporaneous constitutional standards.


United States v. Wicks, 995 F.2d 964 (10th Cir. 1993)