Court Opinion

ID: 9560861
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:57:46.010181+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:15.925796
License: Public Domain

KAREN NELSON MOORE, Circuit
Judge, dissenting.
Because the majority’s probable-cause analysis is directly contrary to this court’s recent holding in United States v. Higgins, 557 F.3d 381 (6th Cir.2009), I must dissent.
In Higgins, the police officer’s affidavit was based on information provided by an informant who admitted to drug crimes and was known both to the officer and the issuing magistrate judge, but the officer did not attest to the informant’s reliability. Id. at 389-90. The panel concluded that “the fact that the informant was known to the affiant and issuing magistrate and admitted a crime does not alone provide probable cause.” Id. at 390. Additionally, the facts stated by the informant and corroborated by the police included “the fact that Higgins lived at the stated location, owned the motorcycle parked outside, and had a drug-related criminal history.” Id. The informant’s information was also corroborated by other individuals who were with the informant when he was arrested. Id. The panel declared that this corroboration did “little to reinforce the informant’s assertions” because “none of these facts supports the informant’s assertion that he had purchased drugs from Higgins at this location the previous day.” Id. The panel concluded that the warrant lacked probable cause because
[t]he informant gave his statements after the police discovered a large amount of drugs in his car, giving him an incentive to cooperate with the police to help himself. The affidavit contains no assertion that this informant is known to be reliable, nor did the police corroborate any of the informant’s statements beyond the innocent fact that Higgins lived at the stated location and the irrelevant (to the determination of whether Higgins’s house contained evidence of a present-day crime) fact that Higgins had a criminal record.

Id.

The majority here concludes that the search warrant at issue in the instant case was supported by probable cause because: (1) the affidavit established that CS1 was reliable because Officer Seals knew CSl’s identity and CS1 claimed that he witnessed a drug deal; and (2) the police independently corroborated CSl’s statements by confirming the existence of the two ears, the cabin, and the two individuals described by CS1, and by learning that Dyer had an open arrest warrant in North Carolina related to methamphetamine. These facts are strikingly similar to the facts of Higgins, and, in every respect except one, the facts supporting probable cause in this case are less supportive or equally as supportive as those in Higgins. *394Here, as in Higgins, CS1 was currently-facing felony drug charges and was known to the police officer; however, the police officer did not attest to CSl’s reliability. Unlike Higgins, CS1 was not known to the magistrate judge, admitted only to witnessing a drug transaction, and did not have his story corroborated by other individuals. Thus, there is weaker evidence of reliability concerning CS1 than regarding the informant in Higgins. Further, Officer Seals corroborated the existence of the cabin, two vehicles, and the two individuals described by CS1, just as the officer in Higgins verified Higgins’s residence and motorcycle ownership. Just as in Higgins, these innocent facts which were corroborated do little to support CSl’s assertions regarding drug activity. Finally, although the officers in both cases had knowledge of the defendant’s criminal history, such information is irrelevant.1 Higgins, 557 F.3d at 390.
The only notable difference between Higgins and the instant case is the fact that CS1 did assert that he witnessed the drug purchase inside the cabin, thus “establishing] the necessary nexus between the place to be searched and the evidence sought.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). However, this fact alone cannot compensate for the other inadequacies of the affidavit: It simply cannot be enough to support a search warrant that a previously untested and unknown informant comes to the police with drug charges hanging like the Sword of Damocles over the informant’s head, claims to have witnessed drug activity in another individual’s home, and describes innocent facts such as the home’s location and design and the alleged drug dealer’s physical appearance. Such innocent factual information as the home’s location or description and the individual’s physical appearance is readily available to anyone who has ever entered an individual’s home (or looked through the window) and does nothing to verify a claim of drug activity. The majority thus condones the real possibility of officers searching people’s homes on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations of drug activity by dubious informants who themselves are criminal defendants currying favor for their own sentences or targeting persons out of enmity or spite. Because our Constitution and precedent reject such a lax search-warrant regime, I respectfully dissent.

. Moreover, whereas the officer in Higgins ascertained that Higgins had two prior convictions for narcotics trafficking, Higgins, 557 F.3d at 385, and thus proof that Higgins had been adjudicated guilty of drug offenses, Officer Seals knew only that Dyer had an open arrest warrant in North Carolina concerning drugs, a fact which, by itself, does not definitively show that Dyer had ever been found guilty of a drug crime.