Court Opinion

ID: 9452900
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:56:14.664333+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:24.818442
License: Public Domain

HAYS,
Circuit Judge (dissenting):
With respect „,I, must dissent. My brethren seem to me to be doing exactly what the Supreme Court said they should not do, to wit, “invalidate the warrant by interpreting the affidavit in a hyper-technical, rather than a commonsense, manner.” United States v. Ventresca, 380 U.S. 102, 109, 85 S.Ct. 741, 746 (1965). See also United States v. Freeman, 358 F.2d 459 (2d Cir.), cert, denied, 385 U.S. 882, 87 S.Ct. 168, 17 L.Ed.2d 168 (1966). The warrant here was based upon the affidavit of a police detective who swore that he had been told by an informant of known reliability that narcotics were being sold at a certain address, that he took up a surveillance post outside the “premises” reported by the informant to be the scene of narcotics sales, and that within a short period of time he observed an unusually large number of persons entering the premises including four known to him to be drug addicts. What could be more “hypertechnieal” than to reject this affidavit because the detective failed to state expressly that the apartment referred to by the informant was the “premises” which he was watching?