Defendant’s guilty plea is set aside as a due process as a result of the government withholding information about a second CI in the search warrant papers where the first couldn’t identify him. When the government made a later 775-page document dump, the pertinent information was handwritten in a few margins, and it even eluded the government’s attorneys for a while, who should have just confessed error when it came up. United States v. Garrett, 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 3769 (4th Cir. Feb. 19, 2025) (2-1, decided less than four weeks after submission of a case docketed in 2022). This summary doesn’t do it justice. It’s actually quite stout:
[In Fisher,] We concluded that the officer’s false affirmations constituted impermissible conduct and influenced the defendant’s decision to plead guilty thereby rendering his plea involuntary. In our view, the case involved “gross police misconduct that went to the heart of the prosecution’s case” because the officer’s “deliberate lie” provided the foundation for the warrant that led to recovery of all evidence against the defendant. Fisher, 711 F.3d at 466. We concluded that if the defendant had known that the warrant was not properly supported, or that the main witness’ credibility was in question, he would not have pled guilty. In other words, the defendant’s misapprehension of the government’s case against him, we said, resulted not from his own calculus, but rather from “an affirmative government misrepresentation that [struck] at the integrity of the prosecution as a whole.” Id. We therefore held that, under the totality of the circumstances of that case, the defendant’s plea was involuntary and violated his due process rights.
Relevant here, we acknowledged various aspects of our criminal justice system that counseled reaching that result. We recognized the “important interest of deterring police misconduct.” Id. at 469. On that point, we noted that preventing defendants from challenging pleas based on subsequently discovered misconduct could encourage officers to engage in or conceal misconduct to elicit guilty pleas. We also stated that “allowing a defendant’s guilty plea to stand when a police officer intentionally lies in a search warrant affidavit undermines public confidence in our judicial system.” Id. at 470. We believe those principles apply with equal force to all cases.
That brings us to the instant challenge. In this case, the ambiguity regarding the number of CIs used, bolstered by the omission of the details of each CI’s involvement, and the failure to inform the warrant judge about the investigation’s identification mix-up call those principles into question here. As discussed below, those critical deficiencies which occurred during the initial investigation and pre-plea phase and therefore formed the bedrock of the prosecution’s case all evince errors that occurred before the district court and warrant vacatur. Id. at 466. We address each in turn.
. . .
But here, it is the newly discovered information that acts as the basis of the involuntary plea. In other words, even if the suppression motion had been fully litigated, it would not have implicated or exposed the misconduct that the February 2 disclosure uncovered. The revelation that multiple CIs were used and the context of their involvement calls their credibility into question. Additionally, it reveals information that would have materially bolstered Garrett’s suppression argument and, if necessary, his subsequent trial strategy, by providing additional examples of misconduct. Garrett would have known that the police knew that CI-1 repeatedly misidentified him; that CI-2, the only other informant, never identified Garrett as the suspect; and that law enforcement withheld that information (in addition to the identity mix-up) from the judge.
Collectively, this information reinforces Garrett’s contention that by intentionally choosing to omit or misrepresent facts that weakened their case, law enforcement caused him to plead guilty without the benefit of all the facts leading to the prosecution’s case against him. The cumulative effect of this police misconduct provides compelling probative support for Garrett’s position that intentional misconduct occurred. Thus, we rely on the misinformation about the CIs as the basis of our involuntariness finding but reach the misidentification as a part of our review of the totality of the circumstances. Brady, 397 U.S. at 749 (“The voluntariness of [Garrett’s] plea can be determined only by considering all of the relevant circumstances surrounding it.”). The product of the shortcomings is well worth repeating: the collective effect of law enforcement’s misconduct indicates that every weakness in the case against Garrett was withheld from the warrant judge (and as discussed below, the defects corrupted the prosecution’s case). Therefore, we hold that the police misconduct rose to a level that affected the prosecution’s integrity. See Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 164, 98 S. Ct. 2674, 57 L. Ed. 2d 667 (1978) (“The bulwark of Fourth Amendment protections, of course, is the Warrant Clause, … which surely takes the affiant’s good faith as its premise . … [S]urely [the affidavit] is to be ‘truthful’ in the sense that the information put forth is believed or appropriately accepted by the affiant as true.”).
