Court Opinion

ID: 9789790
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:41:19.257712+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:24.429607
License: Public Domain

DURHAM, J.,
specially concurring.
I agree that the trial court correctly denied defendant’s motion to controvert the search warrant. I write separately, because I disagree with the majority’s reasoning.
The affiant, Deputy Wuest, included information supplied by Deputy Spies in his search warrant affidavit. Spies had told him that she had observed defendant’s house and that all of its windows except one were covered with black plastic. The court found that part of that statement was inaccurate but declined to exclude it, because it was not a statement of the affiant. I concur in the majority’s affirmance because, even if Spies’s statement is excluded, the affidavit contains sufficient facts to support the issuance of the search warrant and there is no evidence that Wuest included the false statement intentionally or with reckless disregard for its truth. Any error in refusing to exclude the statement was harmless.
I do not believe that either the Fourth Amendment or Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution permits a police affiant to establish probable cause by recklessly or *190intentionally including a false statement by another officer in an affidavit. State v. Hitt, 305 Or 458, 753 P2d 415 (1988), held that the statement of someone other than the actual affiant could not be controverted in a proceeding under ORS 133.693. In State v. Esplin, 314 Or 296, 839 P2d 211 (1992), the court determined that the Hitt rule applied, even when the informant was a paid police agent. The lead opinion reads that construction of ORS 133.693 to foreclose defendant’s constitutional argument. I disagree.
In Esplín, the court discussed the extent of the informant’s involvement with the police and concluded that the facts, “without more, [did] not make the informant ‘tantamount to [a] police officer.’ ” 314 Or at 304. The court left open the possibility that a defendant could controvert the statements of a police officer informant. In Franks v. Delaware, 438 US 154, 98 S Ct 2674, 57 L Ed 2d 667 (1978), the Court held that, under the Fourth Amendment, a defendant may challenge the veracity of an informant’s statement if the defendant first makes a substantial preliminary showing that the affiant included the false statement in the affidavit knowingly and intentionally or with reckless disregard for its truth. The Supreme Court also stated that “[t]he deliberate falsity or reckless disregard whose impeachment is permitted today is only that of the affiant, not of any nongovernmental informant.” 438 US at 171. (Emphasis supplied.) That suggests that statements of governmental informants may be subject to a motion to controvert, although the court did not address the issue.
Affidavits may be subject to the Franks rule, or a similar rule under the Oregon Constitution, if the affiant knowingly and intentionally or recklessly includes a false statement from another officer in the affidavit in order to obtain a warrant. This case furnishes no occasion to address that issue.
I concur in the result.