Court Opinion

ID: 9576338
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:23:21.700451+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:05:50.274354
License: Public Domain

KAREN NELSON MOORE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent from the majority’s conclusion that the affidavit underlying the search warrant established a sufficient nexus between the apartment searched and the guns that the police sought. I would therefore hold that the search warrant was defective, and the dis*691trict court erred in denying David Williams’s (“Williams”) motion to suppress.
I. BACKGROUND
Williams entered a conditional guilty plea on charges that he had violated 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) (Possession with Intent to Distribute Controlled Substance) and 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(B)® (Possession of a Short Barreled Shotgun in Furtherance of a Drug Trafficking Crime). Upon sentencing and judgment, he now appeals the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress the evidence on which these convictions are based.
The following facts are drawn from the district court opinion and from the affidavit underlying the search warrant. United States v. Williams, 2005 WL 2127597 (E.D.Mich. Aug.31, 2005). On July 12, 2004 and July 15, 2004, Detroit Police officers executed search warrants on two residences in Detroit, one located at 5950 Hedwig1 and one at 5409 Springwells. A resident of both addresses, Jose Cosme (“Cosme”), told officers that a man called “D-Bird” had taken two guns, one .25-caliber handgun and one .45-caliber handgun, from these locations before they were searched. He also reported that D-Bird had used one of these guns to rob five pounds of marijuana from a drug trafficker. Cosme informed the officers that D-Bird drove a silver Monte Carlo and lived between Michigan Avenue and the 1-94 service drive on Tarnow. Cosme’s mother, Stella Reinoso (“Reinoso”), confirmed these statements.
A few days later, on July 16, 2004, police arrested Kamico Jackson (“Jackson”). Jackson told police that D-Bird’s real name was David Williams, and identified an upper-level apartment on Tarnow as Williams’s residence. The address of this apartment was 4900 Tarnow. Jackson confirmed Cosme’s report that Williams drove a silver Monte Carlo and had robbed a drug trafficker at gun point. Jackson reported that he had seen Williams with both a .25- and a .45-caliber handgun. Finally, Jackson told officers that Williams had recently been arrested for possession of a stolen motor vehicle and that there was a gun in the car during this arrest.
The next day, Detroit Police Officer Darryl Stewart (“Stewart”) observed the apartment at 4900 Tarnow. He saw a man fitting Williams’s description standing next to a silver Monte Carlo outside the building. After seeing the same car there on July 22, 2004, Stewart used the description of Williams to search the police database. He discovered that Williams had been arrested on June 26, 2004 for carrying a concealed weapon. The search also revealed two different addresses for Williams, neither of which corresponded to the apartment on Tarnow. When he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, Williams gave his address as 7176 Park-wood, and the license plates on the silver Monte Carlo were registered at 7163 Park-wood.
On July 23, Stewart applied for and received a warrant to search the upper level of 4900 Tarnow for weapons and related materials. Stewart’s affidavit in support of this warrant alleged the following facts: 1) weapons had been seized during searches at 5950 Hedwig and 5409 Spring-wells; 2) Cosme, a resident of both locations, said that D-Bird had a .25- and a .45-caliber handgun that had been moved from these addresses shortly before the searches were conducted; 3) Reinoso confirmed Cosme’s statements, and both Cosme and Reinoso told police that D-*692Bird drove a silver Monte Carlo and lived on Tarnow between Michigan Ave and the 1-94 service drive; 4) when Jackson, a known associate of Cosme and D-Bird, was arrested, he informed police that D-Bird’s real name was David Williams, and Jackson identified an upper-level apartment on Tarnow (4900 Tarnow) as Williams’s residence; 5) Jackson also told police that Williams had been arrested for possession of a stolen motor vehicle and that he had a gun in the car at the time; 6) Jackson stated that he had seen Williams with a .25- and a .45-caliber handgun; 7) both Cosme and Jackson informed police that D-Bird had used a .45-caliber gun to rob a drug dealer of five pounds of marijuana; 8) through surveillance, Stewart observed a man fitting Williams’s description standing near a silver Monte Carlo which was seen in front of 4900 Tarnow on two separate days; 9) Stewart searched the police database and found a man named David Williams who looked like the man he saw standing by the Monte Carlo; 10) this Williams had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon on July 26, 2004; 11) at the time of this arrest, Williams gave his address as 7176 Parkwood and the Monte Carlo’s license plates were registered at 7163 Parkwood.
When they executed the warrant at 4900 Tarnow, the police found cocaine base and a short-barreled shotgun, but they did not find either of the two handguns mentioned in the affidavit.
After the search, Williams was indicted and entered a conditional guilty plea to charges of possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and possession of a short-barreled shotgun in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(l)(B)(i), respectively.
II. ANALYSIS
When evaluating the denial of a motion to suppress, we review the district court’s factual findings for clear error, and we review its determination of probable cause de novo. United States v. Rodriguez-Sua-zo, 346 F.3d 637, 643 (6th Cir.2003).
Under the Fourth Amendment, a warrant can only issue when there is probable cause, or “a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.” United States v. Miller, 314 F.3d 265, 268 (6th Cir.2002) (internal quotation marks omitted), cert. denied, 539 U.S. 908, 123 S.Ct. 2261, 156 L.Ed.2d 121 (2003). The issuing judge determines whether there is probable cause by applying a common-sense “totality of the circumstances approach.” Id. We give an issuing judge’s finding of probable cause great deference and reverse only when the judge could have had no “ ‘substantial basis’ ” for finding probable cause. Id. at 268-69 (quoting Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 236, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 76 L.Ed.2d 527 (1983)).
In order to establish probable cause, an affidavit must demonstrate a “nexus between the place to be searched and the evidence sought.” United States v. Van Shutters, 163 F.3d 331, 336-37 (6th Cir.1998) (internal quotation marks omitted), cert. denied, 526 U.S. 1077, 119 S.Ct. 1480, 143 L.Ed.2d 563 (1999). The majority rejects Williams’s argument that the affidavit underlying the search warrant for the apartment at 4900 Tarnow failed to establish probable cause. However, the common-sense review called for by both precedent and the majority reveals that, because the underlying affidavit failed to demonstrate any nexus between 4900 Tarnow and the two handguns, the search warrant lacked probable cause.
The majority’s holding undercuts this court’s precedents and the Fourth Amend*693ment by allowing a warrant to issue so long as the affidavit alleges that the individual under investigation has done something criminal and lives in a certain location. The majority finds a nexus based solely on the fact that two informants said Williams had used a gun in a robbery and that the same two informants identified Williams’s home as 4900 Tarnow (although neither knew this address and one had only a general knowledge of where Williams lived). The majority cites a list of decades-old cases from other circuits in support of its broad expansion of the principle that in some circumstances, “an issuing judge may infer that a criminal suspect keeps the ‘instrumentalities and fruits’ of his crime in his residence.” Maj. Op. p. 688. Such a connection may sometimes be inferred, but this affidavit only connected Williams with a crime and with a location and provided no additional factors permitting a court to infer a nexus between guns and that location.
A. A common-sense review of this affidavit reveals that it contains no evidence of a nexus between the place to be searched and the guns to be sought.
The majority fails to apply the agreed-upon totality of the circumstances test to determine whether the affidavit, standing alone, establishes a connection between the place to be searched, 4900 Tarnow, and the guns sought. Instead, the majority isolates the facts from the affidavit that support its conclusion and then finds a nexus based on what hypothetical defendants might or might not do with evidence of their crimes in a variety of circumstances. The majority’s selective view neglects to address two major flaws in the affidavit.
First, the affidavit contains clear indications that, whatever the majority’s hypothetical criminal suspects do with their weapons, Williams did not keep any guns he possessed in his residence. The affidavit establishes that Williams kept two guns, one of which he allegedly used to rob a drug dealer, at 5950 Hedwig and 5409 Springwells. The affidavit does not allege that Williams ever lived at either of these addresses, and Cosme, a resident of both, did not even know Williams’s real name. The affidavit also asserts that Jackson saw Williams with guns at some location not alleged to be Williams’s home, and that Williams once carried a gun in his car. Not only does this information fail to establish a link between 4900 Tarnow and the handguns, but also it highlights the fact that Williams was known to keep his guns in locations other than his own home. Thus, while the majority rests on the government’s supposedly “logical, and indeed legally correct, assertion” that it is reasonable to infer that some criminals keep evidence in their homes, Maj. Op. p. 686-87, the affidavit we must analyze suggests that such an inference is obviously un reasonable in this case. The inference that Williams would take guns he kept at the home of an acquaintance and bring them to his own home only after committing a crime with them is neither rational nor logical. In fact, the opposite inference is more reasonable; that Williams intentionally kept his guns outside his residence, even leaving them with people he did not know well.
In addition to failing to establish that it was logical to conclude that Williams, not a hypothetical defendant, kept his guns at his residence, the affidavit fails to establish that 4900 Tarnow was Williams’s residence. The majority neglects to mention the fact that while two informants tied Williams to the Tarnow apartment, the police department’s own files linked Williams to two different addresses. Williams gave the police one of these other addresses when he was arrested about a month before the search. Stewart saw Williams’s car outside the Tarnow apart*694ment twice, but he did not observe Williams entering or exiting the building. The affidavit offers no reason to infer that 4900 Tarnow was Williams’s residence, or that if it was his residence it was the place he would keep his guns. The affidavit does not even contain the officer’s assertion that in his experience, Williams, or someone accused of similar crimes, would keep evidence of the crimes in his home. The presence of the additional addresses makes it impossible reasonably to infer that Williams would keep evidence of his alleged crimes at any one of the three locations. An officer’s guess that the evidence would be at one of the three addresses cannot create the necessary nexus. See United States v. Schultz, 14 F.3d 1093, 1097-98 (6th Cir.1994) (holding that a warrant should not have issued where a police officer “did not have anything more than a guess that contraband or evidence of a crime would be found” in the defendant’s safe deposit boxes).
B. The majority’s opinion establishes a precedent that renders the nexus element of the probable-cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment a mere formality.
Apart from ignoring the import of these glaring flaws in the affidavit, the majority expands this court’s precedents in a disturbing way. Our previous caselaw has drawn a line between cases in which investigation revealed complicated, ongoing criminal activity such that a judge could infer that the defendant kept evidence of that activity in his home, and cases in which information about a single crime or an individual’s status did not permit an inference that there would be evidence of further criminal activity in that individual’s home.
Cases in which this court has allowed a nexus to be inferred between a suspect and his residence have all included concrete, specific information tying the location with the crime, beyond just the fact that the defendant may have committed the crime and may live in that location. Each case has included some additional “plus” factor allowing the nexus to be inferred. United States v. Newton, 389 F.3d 631, 639-42 (6th Cir.2004) (Moore, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part), vacated in part on other grounds, 546 U.S. 803, 126 S.Ct. 280, 163 L.Ed.2d 35 (2005). In United States v. Miggins, 302 F.3d 384, 393-94 (6th Cir.2002), cert. denied, 538 U.S. 971, 123 S.Ct. 1772, 155 L.Ed.2d 531 (2003), this court upheld a search warrant obtained after police observed two men receive a controlled delivery of cocaine, found out where they lived, and included information regarding the men’s ongoing participation in drug trafficking. All of the cases cited in support of this holding involved drug trafficking and the assertion that drug dealers often keep evidence of drug dealing in their homes. Id. In the unpublished case United States v. Gunter, 266 Fed.Appx. 415, 418-19 (6th Cir.2008) (unpublished decision), police observed the defendant, an alleged drug dealer, stop briefly at his house before selling drugs to a confidential informant. This court upheld the warrant based on a state agent’s experience that drug traffickers often keep evidence of their crimes in their homes, but the panel warned that “[t]he mere fact that someone is a drug dealer is not alone sufficient to establish probable cause to search their home.” Id. at 418. In Newton, 389 F.3d 631, the defendant was found with a very large quantity of marijuana, tried to hide his address from the police, and was alleged to be engaged in drug dealing. In United States v. Caicedo, 85 F.3d 1184 (6th Cir.1996), the defendant was arrested when cocaine was found in his companion’s backpack, he lied about his address, and the officer alleged that drug traffickers often keep evidence at their homes.
*695I have written separately before to express my discomfort with the caselaw described above, as it “comes dangerously close to creating a special rule for drug-related search warrants, inappropriate under Richards v. Wisconsin, 520 U.S. 385, 392-95, 117 S.Ct. 1416, 137 L.Ed.2d 615 (1997) ..., and to eliding the distinction between probable cause to believe an individual guilty of a crime and probable cause to search property owned by that individual, in contravention of Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, 436 U.S. 547, 556-59 & n. 6, 98 S.Ct. 1970, 56 L.Ed.2d 525 (1978) ... and Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 762-63, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969).” Newton, 389 F.3d at 639-40 (Moore, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). The majority opinion, however, goes far beyond this worrisome precedent and, in doing so, obliterates the nexus requirement of the Fourth Amendment.
When the cases discussed above are contrasted with cases in which this court has declined to find a sufficient nexus, it becomes clear that today’s holding has erased even the feeble requirement that there be a “plus” factor tying the item sought to the location to be searched before a proper warrant will issue. In United States v. McPhearson, 469 F.3d 518, 524-25 (6th Cir.2006), this court held that the fact that a search of a man arrested on assault charges uncovered drugs on his person did not provide the probable cause necessary for a warrant to search his home. The McPhearson panel noted the requirement of a “plus” factor before a nexus can be inferred, holding that in cases where an inference was found to be proper, “the affidavits contained an additional fact that permitted the magistrate to draw the inference that evidence of wrongdoing would be found in the defendants’ homes — namely, the independently corroborated fact that the defendants were known drug dealers at the time the police sought to search their homes.” Id. at 524-25. In United States v. Savoca, 761 F.2d 292, 294-95 (6th Cir.1985), this court held that there was no probable cause to search a motel room for evidence of a robbery when the robbery had taken place thousands of miles away and the affidavit did not state how recent the robbery was. This holding illustrates the fact that a common-sense reading of an affidavit may reveal “minus” factors that weaken an inferred nexus. As discussed above, the affidavit underlying the search of Williams’s home contained these “minus” factors without the “plus” factors demanded by McPhearson.
The majority holds that although our prior caselaw explicitly required allegations of ongoing drug trafficking activity before a nexus could be inferred, such allegations are not necessary. Compare Maj. Op. p. 688 with McPhearson, 469 F.3d at 524-25. The majority expands a rule that was already approaching constitutional limits to an absurd and unconstitutional degree. Under the majority’s holding, as long as an affidavit alleges that a crime was committed by an individual and that the individual lives in a certain residence, a nexus can be inferred and a search warrant can issue for that residence. See Maj. Op. p. 688 (listing supposed “plus” factors allowing a judge to infer a nexus). This rule completely dispenses with the nexus requirement and merges the standards for an arrest warrant with the standards for a search warrant. Such a result is contrary to well-established Supreme Court caselaw. See Zurcher, 436 U.S. at 556, 98 S.Ct. 1970 (“The critical element in a reasonable search is not that the owner of the property is suspected of crime but that there is reasonable cause to believe that the specific ‘things’ to be searched for and seized are located on the property to which entry is sought.”).
*696The majority relies on decades-old cases from our sister circuits to leap from allowing a nexus to be inferred only when an affidavit presents strong evidence of an individual’s involvement in an ongoing drug conspiracy to eviscerating the nexus requirement entirely. The affidavit presented here includes no allegations of ongoing criminal activity of any kind; it does not even include an officer’s assertion that he has reason to believe the guns would be found at this location. Instead, it links Williams to three separate addresses and to one alleged crime. It draws no link between the crime or the guns and any of these three addresses. The affidavit also shows that Williams tended to store his guns away from his home, so even if one of these addresses could be chosen for a search, the affidavit offers no nexus, no reason to believe that these guns would be at that residence.
I would hold that this search warrant was defective because it failed to establish a nexus between the items to be seized and the location to be searched. I would therefore reverse Williams’s conviction. The majority’s holding will significantly damage, if not destroy, the protections of the Fourth Amendment as it pertains to search and seizure, and I must, therefore, respectfully dissent.2

. While the affidavit identifies this address as 5950 St. Hedwig, the district court and the majority both call it 5950 Hedwig. Following their lead, this opinion will designate this address as 5950 Hedwig.

. In a footnote, the majority quotes a portion of this sentence and charges me with striking "an alarmist tone.” In the same footnote, the majority asserts that it has not established a new rule but has simply performed a common-sense evaluation of the facts in this particular case. The majority opinion does review some of the facts, but in order to uphold the search warrant, the majority must expand the once-limited rule allowing a fact finder to infer a nexus between the place to be searched and the thing to be sought.
The majority also briefly asserts in the same footnote that even if the affidavit did not establish probable cause, suppression is an inappropriate remedy because the police officers reasonably and in good faith relied on the warrant. See United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 922-23, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984). However, as the Supreme Court noted in Leon, the exception to the suppression rule applies only when "the officer’s reliance on the magistrate’s probable-cause determination and on the technical sufficiency of the warrant he issues [is] objectively reasonable.” Id. It is settled law that before a warrant will issue, an affidavit must establish a nexus between the place to be searched and the thing to be sought. Van Shutters, 163 F.3d at 336-37. The affidavit we consider today establishes no nexus between the guns and 4900 Tarnow, and given this glaring omission, the officers had "no reasonable grounds for believing that the warrant was properly issued.” Leon, 468 U.S. at 922-23, 104 S.Ct. 3405. I therefore dissent from the majority's “alternative basis for its ruling.” Maj. Op. p. 688-89 n. 1.