D.Me.: “The Government appears to argue that close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and warrantless searches so long as the police work was not hallmarked by nefarious intent.”

The warrant was used to search a trailer based on a warrant for the truck, and the warrant was clearly deficient for the trailer. “This case involves a ‘glaring deficiency,’ id., rather than a ‘virtually unnoticeable’ omission. Watson, 498 F.3d at 432; see also Leon, 468 U.S. at 923 (‘[A] warrant may be so facially deficient–i.e., in failing to particularize the place to be searched or the things to be seized–that the executing officers cannot reasonably presume it to be valid.’). Because any reasonable officer that read the warrant would have known that a search of the tractor trailer was not authorized, the good-faith exception cannot apply.” United States v. Bourgoin, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 171119 (D. Me. Sep. 26, 2023):

Groh squarely rejects the Government’s argument concerning the good-faith exception. The Government appears to argue that close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and warrantless searches so long as the police work was not hallmarked by nefarious intent. I do not believe the state troopers’ conduct was based on anything other than a mistaken belief, albeit unjustified, that the particulars of the warrant included the tractor trailer, just as the application materials had. However, that reflection of reality fails to get at the heart of the Leon rule and it does nothing to ameliorate the search of property that was not included at all, much less with particularity, in the warrant. The Groh Court reasoned that the warrant was so facially deficient by failing to particularize the place to be searched that the executing officers could not have “reasonably presume[d] it to be valid.” Groh, 540 U.S. at 565 (quoting Leon, 468 U.S. at 923). Like Groh, even “a cursory reading of the warrant in this case–perhaps just a simple glance–would have revealed a glaring deficiency [concerning the tractor trailer] that any reasonable police officer would have known was constitutionally fatal.” Id. As Attorney Nixon pointed out at the hearing, somewhat more pithily than the Groh Court, “the warrant [rather than the application] is the thing.”

Update: techdirt: Court Tells Cop They Need More Than ‘It’s A Vehicle’ And ‘Guy Looked Nervous’ To Engage In Warrantless Searches by Tim Cushing