D.Mass.: Two month delay in getting SW for def’s storage unit wasn’t with bad faith and didn’t prejudice him

There was a two month delay between the seizure of defendant’s storage unit and the search warrant for it. There was no bad faith here. At worse, getting a search warrant fell through the cracks. The officers had probable cause for the search warrant at the time of the seizure, and they obviously had more by the time of the search, but this delay wasn’t in bad faith and didn’t prejudice defendant. United States v. Bravo, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 198352 (D. Mass. Nov. 21, 2018):

The Court also adheres to its finding that evidence found during the March 11, 2008, search of Defendant’s storage unit should not be suppressed even though the two-month delay between the seizure of the storage unit and its search was unreasonable and unconstitutional. Defendant contends a draft search warrant affidavit for the storage unit created by detectives in January 2008 indicates officers made a deliberate, tactical decision to delay the search of the storage unit while law enforcement developed additional probable cause to justify the search of the unit. This inference, however, is not plausible. By the time officers seized the storage unit by overlocking it on January 11, 2008, they had ample evidence of identify theft, fraud, counterfeiting, and child-pornography offenses to obtain a search warrant for the storage unit. Although the warrant application for the March 11, 2008, search may have contained greater detail than the early-January draft application, that is an obvious outgrowth of the reality that the investigation was further along in March than it was in January and does not undermine the finding that law enforcement had ample probable cause to search the storage unit in early-January. Moreover, there is not any apparent tactical advantage for the investigators to have drawn from the delay in the search of the storage unit. It is far more likely that the task of obtaining a search warrant and conducting the search simply fell through the cracks of an investigation that was rapidly expanding both in scope and in the number of agencies involved and was focused primarily on identifying additional victims of the alleged abuse. Although the two-month delay before the search of the storage unit was unreasonable, as the Court found in its August 3, 2012, Opinion and Order, the record supports a finding that the delay was the result of negligence, and not gross negligence, systemic negligence, or deliberate law-enforcement inaction.