Court Opinion

ID: 9616979
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:51:07.809634+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:04:04.176457
License: Public Domain

BIRD, C. J.
I dissent. When the police have withheld adverse information which might have influenced a neutral and detached magistrate’s decision to issue a warrant, the warrant should be quashed. This result should follow regardless of the motive which led the police to omit the information.1
*397The majority’s scheme for dealing with such omissions in affidavits for search warrants will result in a system in which relevant facts, i.e., those facts which might lead to a decision not to issue a warrant, will be withheld from the magistrate. This will “dilutfe] important safeguards that assure that the judgment of a disinterested judicial officer will interpose itself between the police and the citizenry.” (Spinelli v. United States (1969) 393 U.S. 410, 419 [21 L.Ed.2d 637, 645-646, 89 S.Ct. 584], fn. omitted.) This is neither good law nor good sense.
“The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.” (Johnson v. United States (1948) 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 [92 L.Ed. 436, 440, 68 S.Ct. 367], fn. omitted.) In effect, the magistrate views, from a neutral and detached perspective, the body of information which is known to the police and which, in their eyes, supports a finding of probable cause and the issuance of a warrant. In this constitutionally cast role as factfinder, it is the province of the magistrate and not the police to determine the relevance and credibility of the information which law enforcement personnel have learned and the weight of the various inferences which may reasonably be drawn from it. However, because of the “unavoidable circumstance that the application for the warrant is not an adversary proceeding” (People v. Cook (1978) 22 Cal.3d 67, 87, fn. 9 [148 Cal.Rptr. 605, 583 P.2d 130]), the magistrate must depend on the police to furnish the facts which form the basis for his determination as to whether he should issue a warrant.
When the police edit their information and withhold from the magistrate potentially adverse facts which they view as irrelevant or cumulative, then the police interfere with the magistrate’s constitutional function. Although in such cases warrant applications may contain facts rather than conclusions, such affidavits are nonetheless conclusory in their selectivity. As a result, there is an increased risk that the privacy of the citizenry will be invaded on the basis of the police’s as opposed to the court’s assessment of relevance and reasonableness.
Acknowledging the fundamental constitutional principle that “probable cause determinations [should] be made independently by neutral, *398fully informed judicial officers rather than by the police” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 383, italics added), the majority properly find that an affiant bears a duty to disclose all “material” or “relevant” adverse facts in a warrant application. (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 384.) However, the remedies which the majority prescribe for omissions of relevant facts from search warrant applications are not adequate to protect the principles at issue here.
When presented with a warrant application, the magistrate must “make in effect two successive determinations: first he must satisfy himself that the facts are as the applicant states them to be, then he must consider whether those facts constitute probable cause for issuance of the warrant.” (People v. Cook, supra, 22 Cal.3d at p. 84, fn. omitted.) Under well-established rules of appellate review, the magistrate’s factual findings, including any assessment of the affiant’s credibility or the informant’s reliability, are binding. Appellate courts may not substitute their judgments on such questions for that of the magistrate. (Id., at p. 84, citing Skelton v. Superior Court (1969) 1 Cal.3d 144, 154 [81 Cal.Rptr. 613, 460 P.2d 485].)
Therefore, as this court explained in Cook, when a magistrate issues a warrant, the reviewing court must initially presume that “he found the affiant correctly believed in the truth of each of the factual allegations of the affidavit.” (People v. Cook, supra, 22 Cal.3d at p. 84.) However, if an affiant has intentionally supplied the magistrate with misstatements, a reviewing court may no longer excise the offending allegation and presume the magistrate to have found the remainder to be true. “If the magistrate had known the officer was deliberately lying to him in making certain of the allegations in the affidavit, he might well have disbelieved some or all of the remainder. His ignorance of this crucial fact undermines his determination of the officer’s credibility, and the reviewing court can no longer rely on that determination for the facts necessary to test the magistrate’s conclusion of probable cause. In short, although the court can excise the intentionally false allegations it cannot presume the remainder to be true. Lacking a reliable factual basis in the affidavit, the court has no alternative under settled constitutional principles but to quash the warrant afld exclude the products of the search.” (Id., at pp. 86-87, fn. and citations omitted.)
The omission from the affidavit of facts relevant to an informant’s reliability similarly affects the integrity of the factual findings underlying *399a magistrate’s decision to issue a warrant. When the police omit information which might have led the magistrate to reject the warrant application, a reviewing court can no longer rely upon the magistrate’s presumptive finding that the informant was reliable. The rationale which led this court in Cook to conclude that a warrant should be quashed when it is based on an affidavit containing deliberate misstatements by the affiant is applicable here and should lead to the same result. If the magistrate had all the relevant adverse facts before him, he might well have found that the informant was not sufficiently reliable to support the issuance of the search warrant. The magistrate’s ignorance of these facts undermines any determination of the informant’s reliability. Thus, a reviewing court can no longer rely on that determination for the facts necessary to test the magistrate’s conclusion of probable cause.
This court should adopt a rule that would encourage the police to keep the magistrate fully informed of the factual information necessary to “perform his ‘neutral and detached’ function and not serve merely as a rubber stamp for the police.” (Aguilar v. Texas (1964) 378 U.S. 108, 111 [12 L.Ed.2d 723, 727, 84 S.Ct. 1509].) Indeed, the Constitution is better served if the police are overinclusive rather than underinclusive in the information they provide the magistrate. Further, the police would be better served by a clear rule rather than the detailed taxonomy which the majority opinion advocates. (See generally In re Tony C. (1978) 21 Cal.3d 888, 902 [148 Cal.Rptr. 366, 582 P.2d 957] (conc, and dis. opn. of Bird, C. J.).)
The guidelines suggested by the majority for distinguishing between those facts pertinent to an informant’s reliability which are “immaterial” because they merely provide “predictable details” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 394) and those facts which “bear adversely on the informant’s probable accuracy in the particular case” {id., at p. 395, italics in original), will also be a source of confusion for the police who must conform their practices to the law. Isn’t it better policy to announce a rule which simply cautions the police to include rather than exclude facts when in doubt?
The effect of the majority’s rule will be to encourage the police to withhold from the magistrate relevant facts adverse to the warrant application. If the police exclude relevant information in the reasonable but mistaken belief that it is immaterial as “predictable details of the *400informer’s criminal past” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 394), there is no appellate review. What is even more disturbing is that if the police “unreasonably” withhold relevant information, the majority would apply the deferential “substantial evidence” test and uphold the warrant if a reasonable magistrate could have decided to issue a warrant if he had all the information before him. (Id., at p. 388, and fn. 6.) Thus, the majority would allow a warrant to stand even though the affidavit on which it was based was “substantially misleading” (id., at p. 385, italics in original), unless the “unreasonably” withheld facts would have necessarily precluded a finding of probable cause.2 The legal fictions of such a rule are too far removed from reality to be indulged in at the expense of the Fourth Amendment. Under this scheme, there will never be any informed weighing of all the relevant facts known to the police by a neutral and detached magistrate, as the Constitutions of this nation and this state require.
The majority opinion does provide that a warrant must be quashed if the affiant “intentionally omits any fact for the purpose of deceiving the magistrate or recklessly disregards the accuracy and completeness of the affidavit....” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 390.) However, this is an illusory remedy since establishing proof of a specific intent to deceive the magistrate “would indeed be a difficult burden to sustain.” (People v. Cook, supra, 22 Cal. 3d at p. 91.) The difficulty of proof is compounded when dealing with omissions rather than misstatements because the former are more readily susceptible to plausible justification.
The Constitution entrusts to an independent and fully informed magistrate the duty of determining when a citizen’s right to privacy must reasonably yield to the state’s interest in searching for evidence of a crime. In its decision today, the majority lose sight of the fundamental principle that this duty is not delegable to the police, regardless of how reasonably they might exercise it.
*401In the present case, I agree with the trial court’s finding that “material information was not disclosed to the Court in the Affidavit which might have caused the Court to conclude differently in respect to the credibility of the confidential informant.” Accordingly, I would affirm the trial court’s order suppressing the evidence and dismissing the action.
Respondent’s petition for a rehearing was denied December 17, 1980. Bird, C. J., was of the opinion that the petition should be granted.

The majority opinion confuses the dissent’s position on the issue of material omissions and the role of the reviewing court.
The majority err when they set up a system which requires a reviewing court to defer to nonexistent findings of fact about the reliability of an informant. The problem with their thesis is that it is impossible for a reviewing court to know what inferences a magistrate would have drawn if he or she had been fully informed. The magistrate might have determined that probable cause existed even with the omitted facts. However, the magistrate might have decided that if all the facts had been included, the application for the warrant was not sufficient. In treating these two situations as if they were identical, the majority require a reviewing court to automatically uphold a warrant even though the magistrate would have found probable cause did not exist if all the facts had been fully disclosed.