Michigan Supreme Court

Lansing, Michigan

Bridget M. McCormack, Chief Justice

Brian K. Zahra

David F. Viviano

Richard H. Bernstein

Elizabeth T. Clement

Megan K. Cavanagh

Elizabeth M. Welch,

Justices

Order 

April 16, 2021

162230

PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v SC: 162230

COA: 350046

Jackson CC: 14-004482-FH

LARRY GERALD MEAD,

Defendant-Appellee.

_________________________________________/

On order of the Court, the application for leave to appeal the September 17, 2020 

judgment of the Court of Appeals is considered, and it is DENIED, because we are not 

persuaded that the question presented should be reviewed by this Court.

CLEMENT, J. (dissenting). 

Two years ago, this Court held that the evidence at issue in this case was gathered 

in violation of the Fourth Amendment. However, we did not hold that the evidence was 

subject to the exclusionary rule or that the charges against defendant should be dismissed. 

Because the Court of Appeals erred by invoking the law-of-the-case doctrine to suppress 

this evidence, I would reverse the Court of Appeals and remand for it to consider on the 

merits the People’s argument that this evidence should be admitted.

Defendant was originally charged with possession of methamphetamine that was 

recovered from his backpack during a traffic stop. During the stop, the police asked the 

driver of the vehicle defendant was riding in if they could search the vehicle, and when 

the driver consented, the police proceeded to search defendant’s backpack—which was 

inside the automobile—even though they knew that the backpack belonged to defendant 

rather than the driver. In the lower courts, defendant challenged the admission into 

evidence of the drugs discovered in the backpack, but his challenge was rejected on the 

basis of our order in People v Labelle, 478 Mich 891 (2007), which held that a search 

under similar circumstances was valid. When the case reached us, we overruled Labelle

and held that controlling law was instead the rule from Illinois v Rodriguez, 497 US 177 

(1990), requiring that consent to search must be given by someone with either actual or 

apparent authority over the property. Because the driver had no apparent authority over 

the backpack, we held that “the search of the backpack was not based on valid consent 

and is per se unreasonable unless another exception to the warrant requirement applies,” 

and we went on to hold that “none of the other exceptions to the warrant requirement has 

been satisfied.” People v Mead, 503 Mich 205, 220, reh den 503 Mich 1041 (2019).
2

Notably, however, we did not hold that the evidence against defendant should be 

suppressed. Instead, we “vacate[d] the trial court order denying the defendant’s motion 

to suppress” and “remand[ed] to the trial court for further proceedings not inconsistent 

with this opinion.” Id. This was not random—in this Court, the People had argued that 

the police had in any event relied in good faith on our Labelle order, such that even if 

Labelle were to be overruled, this evidence should be admissible. Our prior ruling 

pointedly left open the question of whether the good-faith exception to the exclusionary 

rule applied. Indeed, the People filed a motion for rehearing or clarification asking us the 

precise question of whether they could make a good-faith exception argument on remand, 

which I thought was denied because our opinion was already sufficiently clear on this 

point. In the remand proceedings we ordered, the People maintained their position that 

the evidence should be admitted under the good-faith exception, but the trial court held 

that the evidence was to be suppressed and dismissed the charges against defendant, and 

the Court of Appeals affirmed on law-of-the-case grounds.

The Court of Appeals clearly erred by invoking the law-of-the-case doctrine here. 

It held that we “implicitly ruled that the good faith exception did not apply in this case” 

because it “is a well-known exception to the warrant requirement,” and when this Court 

held that no exceptions to the warrant requirement applied, we had “concluded that the 

good faith exception did not apply in this case.” People v Mead, unpublished per curiam 

opinion of the Court of Appeals, issued September 17, 2020 (Docket No. 350046), p 4. 

This is incorrect, however. The good-faith exception is not an exception to the warrant 

requirement; it is an exception to the exclusionary rule. “The Fourth Amendment 

proscribes all unreasonable searches and seizures, and it is a cardinal principle that 

‘searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or 

magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment—subject only to a few 

specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.” Mincey v Arizona, 437 US 385, 

390 (1978), quoting Katz v United States, 389 US 347, 357 (1967). However, “[w]hether 

the exclusionary sanction is appropriately imposed in a particular case . . . is ‘an issue 

separate from the question whether the Fourth Amendment rights of the party seeking to 

invoke the rule were violated by police conduct.’ ” United States v Leon, 468 US 897, 

906 (1984), quoting Illinois v Gates, 462 US 213, 223 (1983). We have similarly 

referred to Leon as having “adopted a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule.” 

People v Goldston, 470 Mich 523, 528 (2004). While Leon was about good-faith reliance 

on a search warrant that was ultimately found not to have been supported by adequate 

probable cause, the Supreme Court has also held “that when the police conduct a search 
I, Larry S. Royster, Clerk of the Michigan Supreme Court, certify that the

foregoing is a true and complete copy of the order entered at the direction of the Court.

 April 16, 2021 

s0413

3

Clerk

in objectively reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent, the exclusionary rule 

does not apply.” Davis v United States, 564 US 229, 249-250 (2011).

I have no view on whether this evidence should be admitted. Indeed, given that 

we overruled Labelle in deference to Rodriguez, even though Rodriguez predated Labelle

by nearly two decades, I believe we are eliding the very interesting question of what 

“reasonable reliance” would look like in that context. Are the police free to take the 

courts at face value, and assume that seemingly contradictory directives in Labelle and 

Rodriguez must be reconcilable if they were allowed to coexist by the judicial institutions 

responsible for articulating the meaning of the law? Or should they, in essence, have 

anticipated that our Labelle decision was incorrect under binding precedent from a higher 

authority? For that matter, did the People invoke the good-faith exception in an 

adequately timely manner in these proceedings, or should this evidence be excluded on

that basis? I do not have answers to these questions—but I do know that nothing this 

Court has done up to now has resolved them, and the law-of-the-case doctrine should 

therefore not apply. I would reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals and remand for 

it to consider these arguments, and I therefore dissent.

ZAHRA, J., joins the statement of CLEMENT, J.