United States v. Peter Cunag, AKA Peter James Martinez

Peter Cunag entered a conditional guilty plea to the charge of possessing stolen mail, reserving the right to appeal the denial of his pre-trial motion to suppress evidence. In that motion, Cunag sought to suppress stolen mail seized by police officers from a hotel room which Cunag had procured by registering under a false name, using a dead woman’s credit card, and providing admittedly forged authorization and identification documents. The record contains ample and compelling evidence that Cunag was not lawfully present in the hotel room because he procured it through fraud. Thus, we hold that Cunag had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the room, and we affirm the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress the evidence.

I

BACKGROUND

According to his own testimony at the suppression hearing, on November 12, 2001, Peter Cunag cheeked into the Homestead Hotel in Glendale, California under his co-defendant’s name, Nelson Aban. Information he gave the hotel included a false address, a false phone number, and a false company name. To pay for the room, he presented a Bank of America credit card in the name of Paciencia Apan, a dead woman. At check-in, the hotel clerk…