IA: Arrest of the “wrong guy” under a warrant unreasonable where no effort made to determine if he was the right guy or not

Arrest of the “wrong guy” under a warrant here was unreasonable. Defendant claimed he was the wrong Troy Ford, and the officer searched him finding drugs before even attempting to verify whether he was the right one. It didn’t take long to find out he wasn’t, but the drugs on him were found. State v. Ford, 2019 Iowa App. LEXIS 1153 (Dec. 18, 2019):

And the odds are long that Ford shared an exact birthdate with the individual in the outstanding warrants identified by dispatch. The district court tackled that mystery by writing: “No evidence was presented that the Defendant’s name, date of birth, sex, or race did not match that of the Troy Ford named in the arrest warrant.” But that observation misplaces the burden. The burden rested with the State to prove a valid arrest as a predicate to the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement. The State did not present evidence that defendant’s date of birth (or his sex, race, or social security number) did match the information listed on the outstanding warrant for a different individual named Troy Ford. Only such a match would allow a court to find Officer Leabo’s mistake was “understandable” and the arrest a reasonable response to the situation facing police at the time. On these facts, the State did not establish the reasonableness of the mistaken-identity arrest under the Fourth Amendment.

That bottom line would not change even if we assume Officer Leabo did provide dispatch with Ford’s date of birth before placing him under arrest on the outstanding warrants. According to the stipulated facts in the State’s resistance, Ford persisted in telling the officer that he had the “wrong guy” and the officer informed Ford they would “figure out what is going on when they get to the squad car.” The officer handcuffed and searched Ford before placing him in the squad car. The county attorney wrote: “It was after this, that it is confirmed through dispatch that the warrants were, in fact, for a different Troy Ford.” This case is unlike Payton where the driver failed to provide police with identification that could have distinguished him from his father. See 401 N.W.2d at 221. Here, Officer Leabo was able to “gather Troy’s social security number” directly after his arrest and confirm with dispatch that the warrants were not for this Troy Ford. It was unreasonable for the officer not to do so before the arrest. Thus we find this search violated the Fourth Amendment.

. . .

In both Cline and Prior, our supreme court held that an illegal search and seizure would result in exclusion of the evidence from trial under the state constitution, even if an officer held an objectively reasonable belief that his or her conduct was lawful. 617 N.W.2d at 292-93; 617 N.W.2d at 268. The Cline court reasoned that “the exclusionary rule serves a deterrent function even when . . . officers act in good faith.” 617 N.W.2d at 290. By providing a remedy for a constitutional violation, the rule also “protects the integrity of the courts” and “tend[s] to encourage lawmakers to take care to ensure that any law they enact passes constitutional muster.” Id. at 289-90. “Consequently, to adopt a good faith exception would only encourage lax practices by government officials in all three branches of government.” Id. at 290.

Ford is correct that under the Cline and Prior line of cases, the State cannot avoid suppression based on an officer’s good faith reliance on information from dispatch. A similar situation is illustrative. In Arizona v. Evans, the United States Supreme Court applied a good faith exception to the exclusionary rule for an arrest based on an expired warrant that remained on police computers due to data entry errors. 514 U.S. 1, 14-15, 115 S. Ct. 1185, 131 L. Ed. 2d 34 (1995). But because Iowa does not recognize the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, our court declined to apply Evans when a defendant claimed he was arrested on a recalled warrant. See State v. Rolan, No. 06-1105, 2007 Iowa App. LEXIS 773, 2007 WL 1827524, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. June 27, 2007). To be consistent, we must reject a good faith exception to a mistaken-identity arrest when the officer has not provided dispatch with enough information to verify if the subject of the warrant is the detained person. See Grant v. State, 152 Ga. App. 258, 262 S.E.2d 553, 553 (Ga. Ct. App. 1979) (“An arrest warrant is valid only against the person named in it …. And even though [the officer] acted in good faith in arresting another than the person named, the warrant will not justify the action.”).