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Parties Involved:
United States of America
Appellee
Thomas M. Washington
Appellant

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued November 14, 2014 Decided December 30, 2014 

No. 11-3097 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

APPELLEE

v. 

THOMAS M. WASHINGTON, 

APPELLANT

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the District of Columbia 

(No. 1:11-cr-00105-1) 

Tony Axam, Jr., Assistant Federal Public Defender, 

argued the cause for appellant. With him on the briefs was 

A.J. Kramer, Federal Public Defender. Lara G. Quint, 

Assistant Federal Public Defender, entered an appearance. 

Chrisellen R. Kolb, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the 

cause for appellee. On the brief were Ronald C. Machen Jr., 

U.S. Attorney, and Elizabeth Trosman, John P. Mannarino, 

and Peter S. Smith, Assistant U.S. Attorneys. 

Before: GARLAND, Chief Judge, WILKINS, Circuit Judge, 

and WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge. 

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Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS. 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: Following a jury trial, 

Thomas Washington was convicted of possession with intent 

to distribute 28 grams or more of cocaine base, possession 

with intent to distribute cannabis, and various firearms 

offenses. On appeal, Washington argues that the district court 

erred in denying his pretrial motion to suppress evidence 

because the government’s search-warrant affidavit did not 

establish probable cause to search his residence. We agree 

with the district court that, even if the affidavit was inadequate 

to support a search warrant, this case falls within the goodfaith exception of United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984). 

We therefore affirm. 

* * * 

On September 26, 2009, Officer Jordan D. Katz of the 

Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department applied for 

a warrant to search the residence at 3025 Yost Place, 

Northeast, in Washington D.C. In his affidavit in support of 

the application, Officer Katz stated that within the past 72 

hours he had spoken to a confidential informant who had been 

used on over 100 occasions and had never provided police 

officers with false information. The informant told Officer 

Katz that a friend, labeled the “unwitting informant,” had 

asked the confidential informant to accompany him or her to 

3025 Yost Place to purchase crack cocaine from an individual 

named “Tom.” After arriving at the location, the confidential 

informant broke away from the unwitting informant to 

conceal himself or herself. The confidential informant then 

observed a man exit the residence, walk down the front steps, 

and enter a parked blue Cadillac bearing District of Columbia 

tags “BS3960.” The confidential informant observed the 

unwitting informant enter the Cadillac with the man who had 

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just emerged from 3025 Yost Place and exit the car after 

several moments. The unwitting informant then met the 

confidential informant, displayed a white rock substance that 

the confidential informant recognized as crack cocaine, and 

said that the deal “went good.” 

Katz’s affidavit went on to say that the confidential 

informant accompanied him to 3025 Yost Place, where the 

officer observed the blue Cadillac parked in front of the 

residence. Katz conducted a records check that revealed that 

the Cadillac was registered to a Thomas Washington of 3001 

Yost Place and also gave Washington’s birthdate. Another 

records check revealed that a Thomas Washington had been 

arrested in 1998 in front of 3025 Yost Place for possession of 

an open container of alcohol, and had given 3025 Yost Place 

as his residence. A third check showed that a Thomas 

Washington, with the same birthdate as the Thomas 

Washington to whom the Cadillac was registered, had 

previously pleaded guilty to felony charges involving the 

distribution of and possession with intent to distribute cocaine. 

Based on this affidavit, a District of Columbia Superior 

Court judge issued a warrant to search 3025 Yost Place. The 

next day, police officers executed the warrant and found crack 

cocaine, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, and various firearms 

in the residence. 

Before trial, Washington moved to suppress the evidence 

seized by the police in the search. He argued that the affidavit 

did not present facts to support probable cause: the unwitting 

informant might well have been unreliable, there was no 

nexus between the drug sale in the car and the residence at 

3025 Yost Place, and the information in the affidavit was or at 

least may have been stale. The district court denied the 

motion. After conviction and sentencing, Washington 

appealed. 

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* * * 

The Fourth Amendment provides that “no Warrants shall 

issue, but upon probable cause.” U.S. CONST. amend. IV. To 

comply with that prescription, the affidavit in support of a 

request for a warrant must provide a “substantial basis for 

concluding that probable cause existed.” United States v. 

Warren, 42 F.3d 647, 652 (D.C. Cir. 1994) (quoting Illinois v. 

Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 238-39 (1983)). The task of a judge 

reviewing an affidavit for probable cause “is simply to make a 

practical, common-sense decision whether, given all the 

circumstances set forth in the affidavit before him, . . . there is 

a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will 

be found in a particular place.” Gates, 462 U.S. at 238. 

Even assuming that Officer Katz’s affidavit in this case 

did not support a finding of probable cause by the Superior 

Court judge, the government has available the good-faith 

exception of United States v. Leon. “[W]hen an officer acting 

with objective good faith has obtained a search warrant from a 

judge or magistrate and acted within its scope,” the 

exclusionary rule does not apply to the fruits of that search, 

even if the affidavit was in fact inadequate to establish 

probable cause. Leon, 468 U.S. at 920. “In the ordinary case, 

an officer cannot be expected to question the magistrate’s 

probable-cause determination or his judgment that the form of 

the warrant is technically sufficient.” Id. at 921; see also 

United States v. Gaston, 357 F.3d 77, 80-81 (D.C. Cir. 2004). 

Washington argues that the affidavit was so deficient that 

a police officer “could not have harbored an objectively 

reasonable belief in the existence of probable cause,” as 

required for the application of Leon, and that suppression is 

therefore appropriate. See 468 U.S. at 926. We disagree. 

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First, Washington claims that, although the confidential 

informant had a proven record of reliability, his reliance on 

hearsay from the unwitting informant of unknown veracity 

(e.g., his statements that “Tom” lived at 3025 Yost Place and 

that the deal “went good”) renders the tip inadequate. But the 

affidavit relies overwhelmingly on the confidential 

informant—whose reliability Washington does not question—

and the records checks. 

The confidential informant witnessed a man leave the 

house at 3025 Yost Place and spend several moments in a car 

with the unwitting informant, after which the unwitting 

informant showed the confidential informant what he 

recognized to be drugs. Officer Katz then independently 

verified that someone using the name Thomas Washington 

was closely associated with both the 3000 block of Yost Place 

and the car, having given 3001 Yost Place as his residence in 

registering the Cadillac and 3025 Yost Place on being booked 

for possession of an open container of alcohol. 

As to the “unwitting informant,” Washington points out 

that courts, in giving weight to the claims of an informant 

with no established reliability, commonly rely on the 

informant’s provision of non-public predictive information 

that is later confirmed by the police. Gates, 462 U.S. at 241; 

United States v. Laws, 808 F.2d 92, 102 (D.C. Cir. 1986). 

Here, he says, the unwitting informant failed to provide such 

information. 

But the unwitting informant did predict that he or she 

would purchase cocaine from someone named “Tom” in the 

vicinity of 3025 Yost Place, and indeed then proceeded to that 

address, entered a car registered to Thomas Washington with 

a person who emerged from 3025 Yost Place, and, after a 

brief time in the car, came out and presented the confidential 

informant with crack, claiming it was the fruit of the activity 

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in the car. The police corroborated the unwitting informant’s 

identification of “Tom” through the confidential informant, 

whose reliability is conceded and who observed “Tom” leave 

the house and enter the car, and through records checks that 

revealed that a Thomas Washington owned the car and had 

previously given 3025 Yost Place as his address. See Laws, 

808 F.2d at 102 (relying on unidentified informants who 

provided the suspects’ names and what motel rooms they 

occupied—information confirmed by motel registration 

records). Thomas Washington’s prior conviction for cocaine 

distribution also corroborated the unwitting informant’s 

statement that he had bought crack from “Tom.” See id. at 

101 n.67, 103 (giving weight to a prior narcotics conviction). 

While of course the unwitting informant might have had the 

crack on hand before entering the car, the activities witnessed 

by the confidential informant seem at least highly suggestive 

of the predicted drug deal. Indeed, Washington offers no 

alternative explanation of the trip from house to car and the 

brief joint presence in the car. 

Second, Washington asserts that the confidential 

informant’s tip was stale: while the affidavit pinpoints the 

time of Officer Katz’s conversation with the confidential 

informant as “within the last seventy-two hours,” the affidavit 

fails to state when the alleged drug transaction itself occurred. 

According to Washington, this vagueness contravenes the 

requirement that the facts in the affidavit be recent enough to 

assure that probable cause existed when the search occurred. 

See United States v. Grubbs, 547 U.S. 90, 95 n.2 (2006). 

Washington’s contention appears to reflect precisely the 

sort of “hypertechnical reading” of the affidavit that we have 

rejected in favor of commonsense readings. See Warren, 42 

F.3d at 653. The affidavit says that in “the course of the last 

seventy-two hours” the affiant spoke with the confidential 

informant, who said that he or she “had personal knowledge 

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that illegal drugs . . . were being possessed, stashed and sold” 

in and from 3025 Yost Place. Under normal rules for the 

sequence of tenses in English, that wording means that the 

asserted possession was going on at the time of the 

conversation. It would thus be “a fair reading, though not the 

only one,” that in linking the claim of ongoing possession to a 

specific transaction, the informant located that transaction 

within or very close to the 72-hour period. Gaston, 357 F.3d 

at 81. 

Because probable cause must exist at the time that law 

enforcement applies for a warrant, the freshness of the 

supporting evidence is critical. Schoeneman v. United States, 

317 F.2d 173, 178 (D.C. Cir. 1963). Courts have sometimes 

been more “lenient” in evaluating the freshness of evidence in 

extended conspiracies than for single-incident crimes. United 

States v. Webb, 255 F.3d 890, 905 (D.C. Cir. 2001). Future 

affiants would therefore be well-advised to avoid temporal 

ambiguity in their description of drug transactions, 

particularly where only one sale is involved: “[W]hile the 

government ultimately prevails, its victory should be looked 

upon as a warning, not an invitation.” United States v. 

Cardoza, 713 F.3d 656, 661 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (Brown, J., 

concurring). 

Finally, Washington contends that the allegation of a 

single sale of crack cocaine inside a car parked outside 3025 

Yost Place is inadequate to create probable cause to believe 

there were drugs in the house itself. But the affidavit points to 

general practices of drug traffickers enabling the affiant to 

draw such an inference. Officer Katz, after describing his 

extensive experience in drug enforcement, observed that drug 

traffickers “rarely keep on their person or immediately about 

them their entire supply of drugs” and instead “commonly 

retain much or most of their drug supply in their home or 

stash house.” Furthermore, the confidential informant 

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personally saw the man exit the residence before entering the 

car and sitting with the unwitting informant, after which the 

unwitting informant displayed drugs to the confidential 

informant. Under these circumstances, an officer could 

certainly harbor Leon’s “objectively reasonable belief” that 

contraband or evidence would be found within. Indeed, in 

United States v. Thomas, 989 F.2d 1252 (D.C. Cir. 1993), we 

upheld a search of a person’s house on 51st Street, Northeast 

on the basis of the person’s sale of drugs in the 900 block of N 

Street, Northwest. Id. at 1255. The inferential link seems a 

lot tighter here. 

At oral argument Washington’s counsel repeatedly 

argued that a particular circumstance did not “necessarily” 

show or “establish” that a drug transaction had occurred or 

that there would be drugs in the house at 3025 Yost Place. 

Indeed, that is true even when we take all the relevant 

circumstances together. The affidavit and the confidential 

informant’s tip on which it was based do not rule out innocent 

scenarios. It is surely possible that the “unwitting informant” 

had it in for Washington and used his or her own supply of 

drugs to fake the supposed transaction. And it is possible that 

Washington did not generally follow the modus operandi that 

Katz believed was prevalent in the drug market. But the 

probable cause test doesn’t require that the facts assure 

certainty that contraband or evidence of a crime will be 

found—only a “fair probability.” Gates, 462 U.S. at 238. 

And with a search warrant, as here, Leon requires only that the 

affidavit provide ground for the officer’s “objectively 

reasonable reliance.” 468 U.S. at 922. 

The judgment of the district court is 

 Affirmed.

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