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, which conclusively demonstrates that the hotel manager had taken affirmative steps to repossess the room and to reassert control over it before calling the police and confronting the appellant, fully supports the district court’s findings and conclusions that (1) Cunag was not lawfully present in the hotel room because he procured it through fraud, and (2) that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in it, either objective or subjective, at the time of the disputed search. Thus, we affirm the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress the incriminating evidence of his crime.

I

BACKGROUND

According to his own testimony at the suppression hearing, on November 12, 2001, Peter Cunag checked into the Home stead Hotel in…