Court Opinion

ID: 9696213
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:41:11.910126+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:19.672045
License: Public Domain

Justice NIGRO
dissenting.
This Court held in Commonwealth v. Glass, 562 Pa. 187, 754 A.2d 655 (2000), that anticipatory search warrants do not per se violate Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, but we also recognized that “whether a particular anticipatory warrant should or should not be approved, of course, will depend upon the sufficiency of the averments in the individual case.” 754 A.2d at 665. Here, the police obtained a warrant essentially based on averments that they hoped to orchestrate a drug buy and needed an anticipatory warrant to permit them to promptly seize the marked currency they intended to use in the transaction, while the money remained on the premises. Although the majority holds that the warrant was properly issued, I disagree and therefore respectfully dissent.
In Glass, this Court indicated that anticipatory search warrants are necessary to “provid[e] police with the ability to respond quickly to ongoing criminality.” Glass, 754 A.2d at 660. As we explained:
Absent the anticipatory warrant tool, police, with probable cause to believe that drugs will be delivered to a location, must wait until after the delivery to take any action. At that point, police are forced to choose between attempting to obtain a search warrant, or conducting a warrantless entry and search immediately after the delivery in the belief that sufficient exigent circumstances exist to justify that action. The former course risks distribution or destruction of the contraband, while the latter runs the risk of suppression if the courts disagree with the on-the-spot police assessment of probable cause and exigency. Authorizing anticipatory warrants resolves this real-world dilemma in a fashion that far better serves Article I, § 8’s concerns with privacy and the warrant requirement.
*281754 A.2d at 665. From this explanation, it seems apparent that the purpose of anticipatory search warrants is to respond to “ongoing criminality” which is moving at such a pace that failure to act expeditiously upon the occurrence of an anticipated event will pose an unacceptable risk of losing critical evidence. Thus, the classic anticipatory warrant case is one in which a delivery of contraband is in transit from one location to another, and the police seek a warrant to search the delivery destination immediately upon the contraband’s arrival, before the contraband is further dispersed. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Reviera, 387 Pa.Super. 196, 563 A.2d 1252, 1256 (1989) (“When the police receive reliable information that a shipment of contraband will arrive at a specific location, they are faced with a fast-moving situation requiring them to decide between conducting a warrantless search or risking the delay needed to secure a warrant at the last possible moment.”)
The instant case is far from that classic example. Here, according to the Commonwealth, Appellee had been selling drugs out of his house for an extended period of time. There is no allegation that a particularly large drug delivery was in transit to Appellee’s home, much less that a large delivery was expected to arrive and depart in short order. To the contrary, the police in this case, on their own independent timetable, simply planned to attempt a second controlled drug buy and then sought an anticipatory warrant, purportedly to protect against their own marked buy money leaving the premises before a warrant could be obtained and executed.
The majority appears to blindly accept this justification, asserting that “[t]o disapprove of this anticipatory search warrant would force police to await the actual occurrence of the anticipated event, proceed to a police station to type up a warrant affidavit, find a magistrate in the middle of the night, and seek approval, all the while risking that the evidence would disappear and permitting additional sales of narcotics to occur.” Op. at 564. However, I view this justification as mere artifice. If, in fact, Appellee’s residence housed an ongoing drug operation, a search after completion of the *282second controlled drug buy and acquisition of a traditional warrant would surely turn up an abundance of physical evidence, which, combined with the evidence of the two controlled drug buys, would render recovery of the marked money of negligible importance. I therefore do not believe that the purported need to recover that money justifies departure from our traditional requirement that warrants be issued based on established facts. I also reject the majority’s assertion that the police here could not spare the time to get a traditional search warrant, because to do so would permit “additional sales of narcotics to occur.” Not only could the same argument be made with respect to any ongoing drug operation, but here, the police were obviously not overly troubled by the fact that additional sales were occurring, as they had harbored suspicions of an ongoing drug operation for weeks and had nevertheless let significant time pass between the first controlled drug buy and the second.
As I simply do not believe that approving the warrant at issue here advances the apparent purpose for which this Court has approved anticipatory warrants, I would conclude, as the Superior Court did, that the warrant is invalid.