Court Opinion

ID: 9488990
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:01:41.97991+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:13.965203
License: Public Domain

RICHARD S. ARNOLD, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
The affidavit for the warrant stated that the anonymous informant who had given all of the information on which a warrant was to be based had not given false information in the past. With all respect to the Court, I believe this statement was misleading. In fact, the affiant had never heard from the informant before. The clear import of the statement was that the informant had previously given truthful information, or, at least, information that had not been shown to be false.
This is hardly a matter of requiring law-enforcement officers to observe “syllogistic precision,” ante at 1262. It is, rather, a matter of common ordinary speech. A statement that an informant had not previously given false information is clearly calculated to influence the magistrate to whom the application for warrant was to be submitted. The statement could hardly have been other than deliberate. It is not contended that the officer making the affidavit believed that the informant had furnished information on some previous occasion. To read the statement absolutely literally seems disingenuous to me, and certainly not the way one would understand the statement under the circumstances. At the very least, it could have been explained that the informant had not, to the officers’ knowledge, given false information in the past, for the simple reason that the officers, so far as they knew, had never heard from this particular informant before.
For this reason, it seems to me that the affidavit falls clearly within one of the exceptions to the Leon “good faith” rule, and that the motion to suppress should have been granted.