D.Mass.: Six week delay between PC of one drug possession made SW stale; no GFE here

The six week delay between the probable cause and the issuance of the search warrant for one drug possession was stale, and no reasonable officer could have concluded there was. Therefore, the good faith exception doesn’t apply. United States v. Chalas, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 138508 (D. Mass. Aug. 4, 2020):

The case most in point (and most persuasive) on the issue of good faith is United States v. Ward, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 23607, 2020 WL 4282161 (6th Cir. July 27, 2020). In Ward, the defendant was charged with drug trafficking and firearms possession based on evidence seized from his home. The affidavit supporting the search warrant for Ward’s home recited undated text messages implicating Ward in a fatal sale of drugs seven months before the search took place, a trash pull the week before the search that uncovered some loose marijuana, cigar wrappers, and a plastic bag containing an unidentified residue of what police believed might be an illicit substance, and the fact that Ward had been previously charged with drug and weapons offenses. 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 23607, [WL] at *3. Citing Hython, supra, as the case “most similar,” the Sixth Circuit noted that it did not apply the good faith exception in that case “because the affidavit did not indicate a timeframe for the events, and, more importantly here, the isolated controlled buy [in Hython] did not allow an inference that further drug-related evidence would be found in defendant’s home, as the sale of drugs [was] not ‘inherently ongoing.'” 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 23607, [WL] at *5.

In the case at hand, no reasonable officer could have believed that probable cause had been shown that drugs would be found in Chalas’s home six weeks after a single instance of mixing drugs and – this is important – that had been brought to his apartment for that purpose by Ramirez (and not supplied by Chalas). Finding that the government has failed to carry its burden of showing good faith is not to say that the court has implicitly found bad faith on the part of Agent Golia or the officers who assisted in executing the warrant. Chalas, as indicated, was a small piece of a much larger puzzle and it is understandable that, given the massive amount of evidence that had been amassed against Ramirez (whose two stash houses on Everett Avenue and Adams Street in Dorchester were the principal targets of the warrant), a more exacting examination of the lack of evidence suggesting that drugs would be found in his residence was not conducted.

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