A few marijuana roaches found in a trash pull doesn’t add up to probable cause that drugs would be found in defendant’s home. United States v. Abernathy, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 21824 (6th Cir. Dec. 8, 2016):
After a thorough review of the record and relevant case law, we agree with Defendant that the evidence recovered from the trash pull here did not create a fair probability that drugs would be found in Defendant’s home. Our conclusion stems from two considerations.
First, a finding of probable cause here would be inconsistent with McPhearson. In McPhearson, the defendant had crack cocaine in his pocket, and the police arrested him and searched his pocket immediately after he stepped outside of his home and onto his porch. 469 F.3d at 520. These facts were included in the affidavit submitted to the magistrate. Id. at 521. The police thus had indisputable proof that drugs had recently been inside the defendant’s residence: the drugs were in his pocket, and he was inside the residence. Id. We nonetheless rejected the government’s argument that “an individual arrested outside his residence with drugs in his pocket is likely to have stored drugs and related paraphernalia in that same residence,” because there was no additional evidence that the defendant was or had been involved in drug crimes. Id. at 524-25.
The same reasoning is even more applicable here. The trash pull evidence Detective Particelli recovered from Defendant’s garbage suggested that a small quantity of marijuana might have recently been in Defendant’s residence. The connection between the recovered drugs and the residence is much more attenuated here than it was in McPhearson; while the officers could be absolutely certain that drugs had recently been in the McPhearson residence, there is no way of knowing with certainty that the trash pull evidence here: (i) came from Defendant’s residence at all; or (ii) if it did, that it was in the residence recently. If the crack cocaine found in the McPhearson defendant’s pocket did not create a fair probability that more drugs would be found in his home, a fortiori the trash pull evidence here did not create a fair probability that drugs would be found in Defendant’s residence. Cf. United States v. Brown, 828 F.3d 375, 382-84 (6th Cir. 2016) (holding that police lacked probable cause to search home even though drug dog alerted to defendant’s car, defendant had recently been detained for drug trafficking, and [**14] defendant had prior drug convictions, because there was an insufficient nexus between defendant’s drug activities and his home). Moreover, as in McPhearson, the critical missing ingredient from the Affidavit was evidence that Defendant had been involved in past drug crimes. McPhearson, 469 F.3d at 525. Although Detective Particelli knew of Defendant’s criminal history, he did not include those facts in the Affidavit, and therefore they could not have contributed to the magistrate’s probable cause finding. Brooks, 594 F.3d at 492.
Second, the connection between the small quantity of marijuana paraphernalia recovered from Defendant’s garbage and his residence is too logically attenuated to create a fair probability that more drugs were in the residence. Although the trash pull evidence certainly suggested that someone in the residence had smoked marijuana recently, that fact alone does not create an inference that the residence contained additional drugs. Drugs by their very nature “are usually sold and consumed in a prompt fashion,” Frechette, 583 F.3d at 378, and so the more probable inference upon finding drug refuse is that whatever drugs were previously in the residence had been consumed and discarded. Further, it is impossible to tell when the marijuana roaches and plastic bags were put into the garbage. Depending on the household, the trash pull evidence could have been put in the garbage anywhere from one day to several weeks earlier. The inability to tell when drugs were last in the home diminishes any inference that drugs were still in the home. Elliott, 576 F. Supp. at 1581-82; see also Brooks, 594 F.3d at 495 n.5 (suggesting that Elliott “may well have been correct in invalidating the search because there was no way of knowing how much time elapsed between the smoking of the marijuana and placing the trash on the curb”); Boyd, 422 F.2d at 792 (holding that a warrant to search a residence lacked probable cause where the affidavit failed to specify when the affiant “smelled the odor of fermented liquor” on the premises, and therefore the court could not tell whether the evidence was stale).
Briscoe and the cases the government cites in urging that probable cause was present here are inapposite. In Briscoe, the police found “forty marijuana seeds and twenty-five marijuana stems” in the defendant’s garbage. 317 F.3d at 907. A large quantity of drug refuse in a residence’s garbage suggests repeated and ongoing drug activity in the residence, and therefore creates a fair probability that more drugs remain in the home. See Elliott, 576 F. Supp. at 1581 (“[A] large quantity of discarded contraband … might indicate its continued presence in the house.”). Here, however, Detective Particelli only specified that “several” marijuana roaches and plastic bags were found in Defendant’s garbage. The word “several” means “more than one or two but not a lot,” indicating that the quantity of roaches and bags found in the trash pull was not large enough to suggest repeated or ongoing marijuana consumption in the residence. Black’s Law Dictionary, 1583 (10th ed. 2014).
Several of the government’s other cases are also distinguishable. …
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)