CA6: SW’s PC doesn’t even have to be decided if affidavit falls within “heartland” of GFE

The affidavit for this search warrant could have been more detailed, but it doesn’t necessarily show it to be weak. Nevertheless, the court doesn’t even have to decide probable cause because this case falls within the “heartland” of the good faith exception which clearly applies. United States v. Runyon, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 35359 (6th Cir. Nov. 26, 2019):

Third, and most importantly, even if Officer VandenBerg’s affidavit did not provide “probable cause” to search Runyon’s studio—and we need not definitively say if it did or not—this case falls in the very heartland of the Leon good-faith exception. United States v. McCraven is instructive. 401 F.3d 693. In that case, the police applied for, and received, a warrant to search a suspected drug dealer’s home. Id. at 695. The affidavit supporting the warrant application was even sparser than the one here. It simply stated: “an informant who ha[s] previously given reliable information saw [the defendant] selling cocaine and marijuana inside his house.” Id. at 698. This statement arguably failed to provide probable cause, we observed, because, although it was similar to affidavits we had approved in cases like United States v. Allen, it nonetheless failed to provide important details contained in those affidavits, such as statements about “the length of the relationship between the detectives and the informant” or about “the nature of the information provided by the informant in the past.” Id. at 697. There was also “no suggestion that the detectives named the informant to the issuing judge.” Id. Still, we held, because “the facts of Allen [did] not define the minimum requirements for an affidavit based on an informant’s tip,” and because “the sufficiency of the [at issue] affidavit [was] a close question” under those precedents, it seemed “obvious that the law-enforcement version of the hypothetical ‘reasonable person’—i.e.[,] ‘a reasonably well trained officer’—would not necessarily have known that the affidavit supporting the warrant at issue here was insufficient, if in fact it was insufficient.” Id. at 697-98. Accordingly, the Leon good-faith exception applied. Id. at 698.

The same logic holds true here. Although one could point out factual distinctions between this case and Brown, or this case and Allen—for instance, the affidavit in Brown included details about the exact “quantity of drugs” that are lacking here, 732 F.3d at 576, and the officer in Allen informed the magistrate of the confidential informant’s real name, which Officer VandenBerg did not do here, 211 F.3d at 971—at the end of the day, this case is so close to our most on-point precedents that we cannot conclude that either “the affidavit [was] so lacking in indicia of probable cause that a belief in its existence [was] objectively unreasonable,” or “the warrant [was] so facially deficient that it [could not] reasonably [have been] presumed valid.” McPhearson, 469 F.3d at 525; see Appellant’s Br. at 20 (arguing that Leon “factors three and four apply here”). Consequently, the district court did not err when it denied Runyon’s suppression motion on the basis of Leon.