Court Opinion

ID: 9495295
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:58:52.729802+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:55.408238
License: Public Domain

HEANEY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. In my view, the district court erred when it denied Koons’s motion to suppress because Budach’s discovery of marijuana stems did not provide information sufficient to conclude that evidence of drug dealing would be found in Koons’s residence. Moreover, because Budach failed to conduct a sufficient investigation to corroborate the tip, his reliance on the facially deficient warrant was not reasonable.
In this case, the informant’s “tip,” as presented in the affidavit, was not entitled to any weight. “When an affidavit contains information provided by a confidential informant, a key issue is whether that information is reliable.” United States v. Fulgham, 143 F.3d 399, 401 (8th Cir.1998) (citation omitted). “Information may be sufficiently reliable to support a probable cause finding if the person providing the information has a track record of supplying reliable information, or if it is corroborated by independent evidence.” Id. (citations omitted). Here, Budach’s affidavit failed to contain any information to suggest that the informant’s tip was reliable. Budach’s affidavit failed to indicate: (1) whether the informant was reliable; (2) how the informant obtained his information; (3) whether the informant provided any details to support his accusation; (4) the identity of the informant; or (5) the informant’s relationship to the defendant. The informant’s tip thus amounted to nothing more than an unsupported accusation.
The majority argues, however, that the presence of the stems corroborated the informant’s assertion that Koons was dealing drugs, thereby giving the police probable cause to search his house. The majority fails to explain why the discovery of marijuana stems in an individual’s trash suggests that they are “dealing” drugs. At most, the marijuana stems showed that someone possessed or smoked marijuana within Koons’s residence within a few days prior to Budach’s search. The stems alone, however, did not provide probable cause that Koons was dealing marijuana. Moreover, the presence of marijuana stems alone was not sufficient to provide probable cause that marijuana was present inside the house at the time of the search. See United States v. Elliott, 576 F.Supp. 1579, 1581 (S.D.Ohio 1984) (holding that the discovery of discarded marijuana waste amongst garbage, standing alone, is insufficient to support a determination of probable cause). In this respect, I agree with the reasoning of Elliott. Budach’s affidavit:
[D]oes not indicate a large quantity of discarded contraband which might indicate its continued presence in the house. Instead, all we can ascertain is that ... [an unspecified number] of stems had left the home at some point in time.
Furthermore, the nature of the evidence is not such that its continued presence in the home is probable. To the contrary, this refuse is merely the waste product of past marijuana use. Moreover, it is unclear when that past use occurred, when the garbage was removed from the house or even when it was scheduled to be picked up. Even assuming weekly garbage collection, the contraband may *995well have been evidence of marijuana use five days prior to the examination of the garbage. Without corroboration, we cannot say that this supports a conclusion of the probable presence of contraband on the day of the search.... The waste products of marijuana use do not, of themselves, indicate any continuing presence of [marijuana] in the home.

Id.

I also disagree with the district court’s conclusion that the good faith exception applied to Budach’s search because he held an objectively reasonable belief that there was probable cause to search Koons’s home. In United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 922, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984), the Supreme Court recognized an exception to the exclusionary rule in those cases where a police officer conducts a search “in objectively reasonable reliance on a subsequently invalidated search warrant.” The Court outlined four situations in which an officer’s reliance on a warrant would be unreasonable:
(1) the affiant included information in the affidavit that he “knew was false or would have known was false except for his reckless disregard of the truth” and that information misled the issuing judicial officer;
(2) the issuing judge abandoned his neutral judicial role;
(3) the warrant was based on an affidavit with so few indicia of probable cause that an official belief in its validity would be unreasonable; and
(4) the warrant itself was so facially deficient that the executing officers could not reasonably rely on its validity.
Id. at 923, 104 S.Ct. 3405.
To assess the good faith of an officer executing a search warrant issued upon an affidavit he had prepared, a court must look at the totality of the circumstances. See U.S. v. Chambers, 987 F.2d 1331, 1335 (8th Cir.1993). Here, it may said that the underlying affidavit supporting the search was “so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in [its] existence entirely unreasonable.” Id. at 923, 104 S.Ct. 3405. The affidavit was barren of information about the informant, and the tip itself was not corroborated by any evidence of drug dealing.
Moreover, Budach could not have been acting in good faith because he prepared the affidavit upon which the search was based, knowing that the information contained therein could have easily been corroborated further with some additional investigation. For example, Budach could have attempted to make a controlled substance purchase, conducted surveillance of Koons’s residence, or conducted a subsequent trash pull to try to find evidence- of drug dealing, such as baggies, scales, or ledgers. Budach could have also interviewed the informant to determine whether his tip was reliable. However, Budach did not do any of these things.
In sum, Budach should have known that the information contained within his affidavit was not sufficient to provide probable cause that Koons was dealing drugs. Bu-dach failed to include any information to show that the informant’s tip was reliable, and the marijuana stems merely suggested that someone in Koons’s residence had smoked marijuana during the week or so prior to the search. Moreover, Budach obtained the warrant knowing that it was based upon tenuous evidence, when it would have been easy for him to sufficiently corroborate the informant’s tip. Therefore, the issuance and the execution of this warrant was not supported by the “good faith” doctrine, and the results of the warranted search should be suppressed.