MS: Uncorroborated informant hearsay was so clearly deficient that the good faith exception did not apply

The informant hearsay in this was a mere uncorroborated statement with no basis of knowledge that the defendant was involved in creating a bogus Facebook account for another person as identity theft. A judge went ahead and signed off on the search warrant anyway. There was no probable cause, and the good faith exception did not apply because it was so obvious there was no probable cause. State v. Chesney, 2015 Miss. App. LEXIS 277 (May 19, 2015):

iii. Good-Faith Exception and Inevitable-Discovery Doctrine

P40. We also find that this case does not fall under the well-recognized exceptions to the exclusionary rule: the good-faith exception and the inevitable-discovery doctrine. Under the good-faith exception, the State may admit “evidence obtained by officers acting in reasonable reliance on a search warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate but ultimately found to be invalid.” Magee v. State, 73 So. 3d 1183, 1189 (¶21) (Miss. Ct. App. 2011) (citing United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 918-21, 104 S. Ct. 3405, 82 L. Ed. 2d 677 (1984)). However, the good-faith exception does not apply in instances where “the [search] warrant is based on an affidavit so lacking in indicia of probable cause that official belief in its existence is entirely unreasonable[.]” Id. at (¶22) (emphasis added). Here, we find any reliance by the police on the underlying facts to support probable cause for the first warrant was “entirely unreasonable.” Chief Sistrunk obtained and executed the original search warrant based on Dove’s accusations, even though Chief Sistrunk later acknowledged he had never met Dove and Dove had never provided any information to law enforcement prior to this event. A similar situation was addressed in Dalpiaz, 783 N.E.2d at 987-88 (¶49), with the appellate court concluding:

[T]he inquiry is not simply whether the officers thought they were doing the right thing, but whether a reasonably well-trained officer would have known that the search was illegal. … [A] brief perusal of the affidavit would suffice for an officer to realize that the issue of the informants’ reliability had not been addressed. Just as a brief perusal of the boilerplate language contained in the same affidavit indicates that such a statement of informant reliability is a necessity.

More recently, in an unpublished opinion, the Montana United States District Court noted: “Reasonably well-trained officers would have known of the need to corroborate a vague, anonymous, second-hand tip. . . . Suppression here is warranted to further the goal of deterrence of future unlawful police conduct, and to effectuate the guarantee of the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures.” United States v. Embry, No. CR-14-21-BLG-SPW-CSO, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63292, 2014 WL 1809388, at *13 (D. Mont. May 7, 2014). Additionally, as the original search, which resulted in the seizure of Chesney’s computer, was unlawful, the good-faith exception also would not apply to the second search warrant.

P41. The State alternatively argues in its supplemental brief that “this Court may rely on the inevitable-discovery doctrine[.]” The inevitable-discovery doctrine states that “results of an unreasonable search will be admissible if it can be shown that this evidence would have ultimately been discovered by constitutionally permissible means.” Pugh v. State, 101 So. 3d 682, 689 (¶29) (Miss. Ct. App. 2012) (citing Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 444, 104 S. Ct. 2501, 81 L. Ed. 2d 377 (1984)). The State argues that “Kaulfers'[s] disclosures to Chief Sistrunk inside Gator Computers support the reasonable probability that Chesney’s computer and the child pornography stored on its hard drive would have been lawfully discovered.” However, as we have already discussed in the preceding issue, there was no evidence that Kaulfers would have independently contacted and informed the police of the computer files, without the alleged authority of the first search warrant. Thus, we find nothing to indicate the child pornography on Chesney’s computer would inevitably have been discovered through constitutionally permissible means.