Opinion ID: 1995926
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the franks hearing

Text: The defendants' last contention is that the trial court erred in not granting them a hearing, under Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 98 S.Ct. 2674, 57 L.Ed.2d 667 (1978), in which they might have proven that Detective Andrews made deliberate or reckless misstatements in his affidavits submitted to support the application for the wiretap. In Franks the Court said that affidavits supporting search warrants are to be presumed valid. Id. at 171, 98 S.Ct. at 2684, 57 L.Ed.2d at 682. To mandate an evidentiary hearing to challenge an affidavit, the challenger must allege deliberate or reckless falsehoods on the part of the affiant, and the allegations must be accompanied by an offer of proof. Allegations of negligence or innocent mistake are insufficient. Id. Here, defendants did allege that Detective Andrews deliberately or recklessly provided false information in his affidavit. Their only offer of proof, however, was an affidavit submitted by defendant McGoff which denies that some of the events related by the informant to Detective Andrews ever happened. At best it indicates that the informant may have provided Andrews with misinformation. Nowhere is there any proof that Andrews himself deliberately falsified information or that he should have presumed the informant, who had always been reliable in the past, to have been lying. Because defendants' offer of proof was simply self-serving, and because it does not appear to have been supported by anything more than a desire to cross-examine Detective Andrews, it was within the discretion of the trial court not to grant defendants' motion. The defendants' other contentions are without merit. For these reasons, the defendants' appeal is denied and dismissed, the judgment of the trial court is affirmed, and the papers are remanded to the Superior Court.