The building searched was two stories. Defendants argued that the first floor was a barbershop and the second floor was a “warren of rooms” which were residential in character. Thus, two search warrants were required. The court disagrees because the objective evidence to the officers obtaining the search warrant was that it was one indivisible premises. Moreover, the good faith exception applies. United States v. Fields, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15952 (D.D.C. Feb. 1, 2019):
Defendants’ argument suffers from two problems. For starters, it rests on the false premise the second-floor rooms constitute a separate “place to be searched” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. U.S. Const. amend. IV. All the evidence is to the contrary. According to the warrant affidavit, the Premises is identified by one address—2408 MLK, Jr. Ave., S.E.—and is owned as a unitary whole by a single person. See Gov’t Resp., Ex. 1, ECF No. 95-1 [hereinafter Gov’t Ex.], at 42 ¶ 42. The Premises is zoned for a business purpose. See id. And the electric utility, PEPCO, bills “for the entirety” of the Premises. See id. In addition, a photograph of the Premises shows it to be a two-story brick building with only one set of numerals—”2408″—appearing on the façade. See id. at 5. These facts are unchallenged. To be sure, the Premises has two different doors, each of which opens directly onto the sidewalk—one for the barbershop and one for the second floor—but that feature alone, without more, does not establish separate “places” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Defendants cite no authority and present no facts that would cause the court to conclude otherwise. Accordingly, law enforcement did not violate the Fourth Amendment by seeking only a single warrant for the Premises.
Even if each floor of the Premises did demand its own warrant, the “good faith” exception would foreclose suppression. See United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 913, 920-22 (1984). The magistrate judge signed a warrant for the entirety of the Premises and, absent an applicable exception, law enforcement was entitled to rely on that determination. See id. Defendants seek to rebut the good-faith exception in two ways. First, they argue that the affidavit contains a dishonest statement about the Premises, and they ask the court to hold an evidentiary hearing to consider the alleged dishonesty, i.e., a Franks hearing. See Def. Fields’ Reply to Gov’t Resp., ECF No. 104 [hereinafter Def.’s Reply], at 10-11, 15. See Leon, 468 U.S. at 926 (stating that the good-faith exception does not apply if “the officers were dishonest or reckless in preparing their affidavit”). Second, they contend that the warrant was overbroad insofar as it sweeps in the second floor of the Premises, and a reasonable officer would have understood, based on the facts presented in the affidavit, that the Premises was in fact two separate places requiring separate warrants. Def.’s Reply at 6-11, 14. See Leon, 468 U.S. at 926 (stating that the good-faith exception does not apply where officers “could not have harbored an objectively reasonable belief in the existence of probable cause”); United States v. Griffin, 867 F.3d 1265, 1278 (D.C. Cir. 2017) (declining to apply good-faith exception to obviously overbroad warrant). Neither of these exceptions to the good-faith principle applies.
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)