Wrong address on search warrant doesn’t void it because there was no “reasonable probability” the wrong place was searched. United States v. King, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 98047 (E.D. Ky. July 15, 2013)f (R&R 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 101842 (E.D.Ky. May 30, 2013)):
The administrative error of placing an incorrect address on the search warrant is glaring, especially when the listed address is several miles away from the proper location. [R. 119 at 9.] However, precedent holds that such a mistake does not categorically invalidate a warrant. [Id. at 12 (citing United States v. Pelayo-Landero, 285 F.3d 491, 496 (6th Cir. 2002)).] Rather, a two-step inquiry is then required, as the R&R explains. [R. 119 at 12.] King contests the second step in this analysis: “whether there is any reasonable probability that another premises might be mistakenly searched.” There is no reasonable probability of that happening.
The fact favoring King’s position is that the address was wrong. The warrant stated that the residence to be searched was 215 Gabbard Road, Annville, Kentucky, while the proper address is 1600 Hellard Road, Annville, Kentucky. [R. 119 at 9.] In opposition to that fact stands a mountain of evidence. First, the warrant explains in painstaking detail the directions one should follow to find 1600 Hellard Road. [R. 119 at 8 (describing driving distances to the tenth of a mile).] Second, the actual residence—a single-wide mobile home—is described in similar detail. [Id.] The mobile home has red colored trim and red and green colored trim on the right side of the residence; there is a “built-on wooden structure attached to the backside of the residence”; and a wooden roof protects a dirt floor that serves as a porch, which is also attached to the home. [Id.] It is highly unlikely that the residence at 215 Gabbard Road would look similar—even if it was also a mobile home. [Id.] Third, a carport that housed a “blue Chevy pickup displaying Kentucky License Plate #097-LGS” was included in the description. [Id.] And perhaps most importantly, the law enforcement officer who obtained the warrant and helped conduct the search had previously visited this exact residence to serve King with an outstanding arrest warrant. [Id. at 14, 8; see Pelayo-Landero, 285 F.3d at 497 (finding support for the warrant being specific enough in part because of the executing officer’s previous visit to a residence).]
It is unfortunate that the address was wrong, but as explained in Pelayo-Landero, “courts routinely uphold warrants like the one at issue where one part of the description might be inaccurate but the description has other accurate information to identify the place to be searched with particularity.” Pelayo-Landero, 285 F.3d at 497 (citing United States v. Durk, 149 F.3d 464, 466 (6th Cir. 1998)). “Practical accuracy rather than technical nicety” is the guiding principle in resolving this issue. Id. at 496 (quotation omitted). Under this set of facts, there is no reasonable way the accuracy could be compromised. Accordingly, the Court finds King’s objection meritless.
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"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, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"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]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"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)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
