Explaining the competing interests in nexus is United States v. Reliford, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 93053 (S.D. Ohio May 17, 2021). Probable cause to arrest doesn’t equal probable cause to search the suspect’s house, but where do people normally hide things?
Reliford’s argument implicates a vexing area of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. It is well settled that there must “be a nexus between the place to be searched and the evidence sought.” United States v. Carpenter, 360 F.3d 591, 594 (6th Cir. 2004) (en banc). But it is often unclear what constitutes a sufficient showing of nexus in any given case.
The Sixth Circuit recently explored the source of this confusion in an opinion that provides helpful clarity to this area of law. See United States v. Reed, 993 F.3d 441 (6th Cir. 2021). The underlying problem, as Reed explained, is that the nexus inquiry implicates two competing Fourth Amendment principles. Id. at 444. The first principle is that “probable cause to arrest a suspect for a crime does not necessarily create probable cause to search the suspect’s home.” Id. The second principle is that “the probable-cause test allows officers to make common-sense conclusions about where people hide things.” Id.
The tension between the two has given rise to arguably competing lines of cases. Channeling the first principle, for example, the Sixth Circuit has rejected “the proposition that the defendant’s status as a drug dealer, standing alone, gives rise to a fair probability that drugs will be found in his home.” United States v. Brown, 828 F.3d 375, 383 (6th Cir. 2016) (quoting United States v. Frazier, 423 F.3d 526, 533 (6th Cir. 2005)). But, channeling the second principle, the Sixth Circuit also has observed that, “in the case of drug dealers, evidence is likely to be found where the dealers live.” United States v. Sumlin, 956 F.3d 879, 886 (6th Cir. 2020) (quoting United States v. Jones, 159 F.3d 969, 975 (6th Cir. 1998)).
Given the tension between such statements, the Sixth Circuit has “reconciled [its] caselaw in fact-specific ways.” Reed, 993 F.3d at 448. It has done so by holding that “a court need not rely on a known drug dealer’s status alone whenever other evidence (besides the drug dealer’s living there) links drug dealing to the dealer’s home.” Id. So, for example, the Sixth Circuit has found a probable-cause nexus to search a drug dealer’s home when drugs were found in the drug dealer’s car near the home. See United States v. Berry, 565 F.3d 332, 339 (6th Cir. 2009). The Sixth Circuit also has found this nexus when a suspect caught with drugs lied about his home address. See United States v. Caicedo, 85 F.3d 1184, 1193 (6th Cir. 1996).
Thus, the question here is whether there is “other evidence” (besides Reliford’s status as an alleged drug dealer, and the fact that he lives at the residence) that links Reliford’s drug dealing to the residence. There is.
True, Holden’s affidavit indicated that each of the controlled purchases of drugs occurred away from Reliford’s residence. But for the sixth controlled purchased, the affidavit stated that, after receiving a call from the confidential source, officers observed Reliford exit the residence and enter a car registered to a woman named Christina Collins. (Gov’t’s Ex. A, Doc. 52-1, #351-52). Collins then drove Reliford to a separate location and, after dropping him off, Reliford proceeded to sell illegal drugs to the confidential source at a gas station directly across the street from that location. (Id. at #152). In other words, the affidavit alleged that Reliford went straight from the residence that was the subject of the warrant to another location and then, after crossing the street, sold illegal drugs. That at least suggests that he brought with him from the residence the drugs he sold at the gas station, which is enough, under Sixth Circuit caselaw, to establish a probable-cause nexus between Reliford’s drug dealing and the searched residence. See United States v. Coleman, 923 F.3d 450, 457-58 (6th Cir. 2019); United States v. Houser, 752 F. App’x 223, 226-27 (6th Cir. 2018); United States v. Jenkins, 743 F. App’x 636, 644 (6th Cir. 2018).
Consider Coleman. There, officers observed an active drug trafficker “drive directly from his condo to the site of the most recent buy, less than two weeks before the warrant issued.” 923 F.3d at 457. According to the Sixth Circuit, that “was sufficient … to provide a reasonable inference that [the drug trafficker] transported narcotics from his residence to the location of the cocaine sale.” Id. The officers observed much the same sequence of events in Houser, 752 F. App’x at 226-27 (6th Cir. 2018), and in United States v. Jenkins, 743 F. App’x at 644. That is, officers observed a known drug dealer leave a residence, go directly to the site of a controlled buy, and engage in an illegal drug sale. Granted, the drug dealers in Houser and Jenkins also returned immediately to the residence immediately after completing the sale, whereas the affidavit here does not allege that Reliford did the same. But why should it make a difference whether the drug dealer immediately returned to his home or went anywhere else? The drugs were already sold by that point. It is where the dealer came from, not where he is headed to, that would be the likely location of where the drugs are stored. And what really matters is what the drug dealer did between the time he left his house and the time he sold the drugs. A stop at a warehouse location, for example, may break the nexus link. But in Coleman, Houser, and Jenkins, the dealer went directly from the residence to the site of the drug sale. That supported a reasonable inference that illegal drugs would be found at the residences. The same is true here.
