Opinion ID: 1211652
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: analysis

Text: Prideaux-Wentz maintains that the search warrant did not establish probable cause because Agent Paulson's affidavit relied on stale information, was unreliable, contained only general characteristics of child pornographers and nothing specific to Prideaux-Wentz, and did not demonstrate a sufficient nexus between the alleged criminal activity and his new residence. Prideaux-Wentz also contends that because the warrant affidavit lacked probable cause and was based on misleading information, he was entitled to a hearing pursuant to Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 98 S.Ct. 2674, 57 L.Ed.2d 667 (1978). Here, the magistrate, rather than the district court, determined that probable cause existed to support the search warrant. Recently, we clarified the appropriate standard of review that applies in determining the sufficiency of a search warrant issued in these circumstances. In United States v. McIntire, 516 F.3d 576, 578 (7th Cir.2008), we held that reviewing the sufficiency of a warrant should not take the form of de novo review, and on the mixed question whether the facts add up to `probable cause' under the right legal standard, we give no weight to the district judge's decisionfor the right inquiry is whether the judge who issued the warrant (rarely the same as the judge who ruled on the motion to suppress) acted on the basis of probable cause. On that issue we must afford `great deference' to the issuing judge's conclusion. Id. Therefore, since the district court adopted the magistrate's findings, we pay great deference to the magistrate's determination of probable cause. See id. Applying this standard, we find that the warrant lacked probable cause because the evidence that Agent Paulson relied on in his warrant affidavit was stale. While [t]here is no bright-line test for determining when information is stale, United States v. Koelling, 992 F.2d 817, 822 (8th Cir.1993), the warrant does not indicate when the pictures were uploaded to the Yahoo! e-groups, and there is no way to discern this fact from the record. We have suggested that the staleness argument takes on a different meaning in the context of child pornography because of the fact that collectors and distributors rarely, if ever, dispose of their collections. See United States v. Hall, 142 F.3d 988, 995 (7th Cir.1998) (citing expert information in an affidavit that pornographers tend to maintain their collections of material for long periods, usually at home). Nevertheless, there must be some limitation on this principle. While staleness arguments have been rejected relative to evidence accumulated more than one year before the execution of the search warrant, United States v. Newsom, 402 F.3d 780, 783 (7th Cir.2005), in Newsom the government also had other, more recent evidence of continuing criminal activity to bolster probable cause and freshen the older information. 402 F.3d at 783 (where police did not base the search warrant on the year-old pornographic images alone but also relied on the recent discovery by the defendant's girlfriend of a pornographic tape of her minor daughter); see also United States v. Harvey, 2 F.3d 1318, 1322-23 (3d Cir.1993) (evidence defendant possessed child pornography thirteen to fifteen months previously not stale where supported by evidence of additional mailings within two months of warrant's execution). However, the record here suggests that the images could have been uploaded as many as two years before the Cyber Tips were received, which would mean that the information was at least four years old by the time the government applied for a warrant. Unlike Newsom, there is no new evidence to freshen the stale evidence. Although we decline to find that evidence that is two to four years old is stale as a matter of law, cf. United States v. Irving, 452 F.3d 110, 125 (2d Cir.2006) (child pornography two years old not stale); United States v. Riccardi, 405 F.3d 852, 860-61 (10th Cir.2005) (five years); see also United States v. Peden, 891 F.2d 514, 518-19 (5th Cir.1989) (finding that a warrant based on a two-year-old delivery from suspected child pornographers and an eight-year-old conviction for solicitation of a minor was not stale), the government's failure to find out the dates in which the pictures were uploaded supports a finding of staleness in this case because it could have easily obtained this information by contacting Yahoo!. The government concedes that the upload information was available for at least two of the Yahoo! e-groups, information which it could have accessed following Yahoo!'s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement. The four year gap, without more recent evidence, undermines the finding that there was probable cause that the images would be found during the search. Therefore, we find that the evidence relied on to obtain the warrant here was stale, and the warrant lacked probable cause.
Even in the absence of probable cause, a warrant can be saved by the good faith exception. United States v. Olson, 408 F.3d 366, 372 (7th Cir.2005). Whether a law enforcement officer reasonably relied upon a subsequently invalidated search warrant is a legal question which we review de novo. United States v. Harju, 466 F.3d 602, 604 (7th Cir.2006). An officer's decision to obtain a warrant is prima facie evidence that he or she was acting in good faith. Olson, 408 F.3d at 372 (citing United States v. Koerth, 312 F.3d 862, 868 (7th Cir.2002)). However, a defendant may rebut this evidence, if the issuing judge `wholly abandoned his judicial role' and failed to perform his `neutral and detached function,' serving `merely as a rubber stamp for the police' or . . . the affidavit submitted in support of the warrant was `so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable.' Id. (quoting United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 914, 923, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984)). Prideaux-Wentz argues that a reasonable officer would have known that the warrant affidavit was lacking in probable cause because the affidavit establishes that Agent Paulson was inexperienced in evaluating child pornography, there was no foundation to rely on the behavior profile assertions, the evidence was stale, and the affidavit omitted material information that would have led a reasonably well-trained officer to know that more information was needed to establish probable cause. Although we have found that the absence of any time element renders the evidence stale, Prideaux-Wentz has failed to rebut the presumption that Agent Paulson was acting in good faith by relying on the warrant. Furthermore, he has not met the high standard required for a Franks hearing.
Prideaux-Wentz maintains that the affidavit and warrant did not establish Agent Paulson's reliability and expertise in describing and evaluating pornographic images. To support this point, Prideaux-Wentz relies on the fact that Stenzel, the NCMEC expert, disagreed with Agent Paulson's classification of some of the images as child pornography. This argument need not detain us long. Although Stenzel disagreed with Agent Paulson about the classification of several of the images, this disagreement was not based on Agent Paulson's perceived inexperience, but rather because it is often difficult to distinguish between child pornography and child erotica. Since Agent Paulson included a detailed description of each image, the magistrate judge was able to make his own determination about how to classify the images, ultimately concluding that eleven of the images constituted child pornography. See United States v. Lowe, 516 F.3d 580, 586 (7th Cir.2008) (holding that an issuing court can rely on a verbal description of images rather than the actual images to determine whether there is probable cause that the images constitute child pornography). Moreover, the warrant affidavit sufficiently established Agent Paulson's expertise and reliability because the affidavit was extremely detailed, explaining the child pornography and child erotica images in the Cyber Tips, the relevant statutory provisions, expert opinions regarding the behavior of child pornographers generally, and Agent Paulson's experiences with pornography-related searches. Based on these statements, we find that the affidavit sufficiently establishes Agent Paulson's expertise in evaluating child pornography. See United States v. Watzman, 486 F.3d 1004, 1008 (7th Cir.2007) (concluding that the affidavit sufficiently established the officer's expertise where the officer explained, in great detail, his experience with investigating child pornographers).