UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

┐ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, │ Plaintiff-Appellee, │ > No. 20-5096 │ v. │ │ DWAYNE SHECKLES, │ Defendant-Appellant. │ ┘

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Kentucky at Louisville. No. 3:17-cr-00104-1—Rebecca Grady Jennings, District Judge.

Argued: December 3, 2020

Decided and Filed: April 30, 2021

Before: ROGERS, NALBANDIAN, and MURPHY, Circuit Judges. _________________

COUNSEL ARGUED: Kevin M. Schad, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER’S OFFICE, Cincinnati, Ohio, for Appellant. L. Jay Gilbert, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Louisville, Kentucky, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Kevin M. Schad, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER’S OFFICE, Cincinnati, Ohio, for Appellant. L. Jay Gilbert, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Louisville, Kentucky, for Appellee. _________________

OPINION _________________

MURPHY, Circuit Judge. After a lengthy investigation, the federal government uncovered substantial evidence that Dwayne Sheckles was a Louisville distributor for a large drug-trafficking ring. Sheckles pleaded guilty but reserved the right to appeal the district court’s No. 20-5096 United States v. Sheckles Page 2

refusal to suppress much of this evidence. His appeal raises many Fourth Amendment questions. To name a few: What type of evidence creates probable cause to obtain a warrant for a phone’s location data after Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018)? Did a sufficient “nexus” exist between Sheckles’s drug dealing and two apartments to justify search warrants for the apartments? Did officers lawfully stop Sheckles’s vehicle after he left one of these apartments while they were in the process of seeking the warrants? And does a third party’s lack of apparent authority to consent to a search make a difference if officers learn after the search that the party had actual authority to consent? Ultimately, we find no Fourth Amendment violations and thus affirm.

I

The case against Sheckles stems from an investigation of three other people occurring almost a decade before he arrived on the government’s radar. In 2007, the Louisville office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was monitoring a local drug dealer named Byron Mayes. Mayes had been receiving drugs from two brothers, Julio and Alfredo “Freddy” Rivas-Lopez. Living in Phoenix, Julio would ship cocaine from Mexico to Freddy in Louisville. Freddy would sell the drugs to dealers like Mayes. This investigation led to the seizure of many kilograms of cocaine and hundreds of thousands of dollars and the convictions of all three drug dealers.

In 2016, these individuals were out of prison. The Rivas-Lopez brothers were living in Mexico (Freddy had escaped from a federal prison), and Mayes was living in Louisville. Sheckles came to the DEA’s attention during surveillance of a suspected drug “stash” house in Louisville. Offic