Search and Seizure - Staleness

United States v. Roach, 582 F.3d 1192 (10th Cir. 2009)

The search warrant affidavit documented years of gang activity by numerous members of the gang. The incidents involving the defendant were numerous, but the last identified offense was years prior to the issuance of the warrant. The warrant was issued for the defendant’s girlfriend’s house, where he was believed to be living. The only link to the house was the assertion in the affidavit that the officers believed that he was living there. The Tenth Circuit held that the information was insufficient, as well as being stale, to support a search warrant for the house. But the search was saved by the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule.

United States v. Prideaux-Wentz, 543 F.3d 954 (7th Cir. 2008)

The information known to the police was not sufficiently recent to authorize a search warrant. The police received information via a “cyber tip” that the defendant was obtaining child pornography. The information, however, related to events that occurred two years earlier. Though the courts have held that child pornography is generally kept by the recipients, a two year gap is too long for probable cause to exist that the evidence is still at that location. Nevertheless, Leon applies and the court held that the evidence would not be suppressed.

United States v. Hython, 443 F.3d 480 (6th Cir. 2006)

The search warrant application revealed that a controlled purchase of cocaine occurred at the target location, but nowhere in the warrant did the affiant reveal when this controlled purchase occurred. Therefore, the information in the warrant application was stale and there was no probable cause to search the premises. Moreover, the Leon good faith exception did not apply. In reaching the Leon conclusion, the Sixth Circuit noted that whether an officer could objectively rely on the warrant as being valid, the court held that the inquiry is limited to the four corners of the affidavit. Thus, what the affiant actually knew (but did not recite in the affidavit) cannot be considered in the good faith analysis.

United States v. Laughrin, 438 F.3d 1245 (10th Cir. 2006)

Knowledge of a person’s prior criminal involvement is alone insufficient to give rise to the requisite reasonable suspicion supporting a traffic stop. In this case, the officer testified that he had stopped the defendant repeatedly in the past for driving without a license, or on a suspended license. On that basis, when the officer saw the defendant driving, he pulled him over. This was an unlawful stop. The officer’s encounter with the defendant was more than twenty-two weeks previously and this was too long a time to presume that the defendant’s license was still suspended. The information known to the officer, therefore, was too stale to support a stop of the defendant’s vehicle.

United States v. Kennedy, 427 F.3d 1136 (8th Cir. 2005)

The defendant’s girlfriend said that the defendant “deals” drugs and “keeps” drugs in his car. This did not establish probable cause that the defendant then had drugs in his car.

United States v. Zimmerman, 277 F.3d 426 (3rd Cir. 2002)

The police obtained a search warrant to search the defendant’s home to look for child and adult pornography. There was no information in the warrant application that indicated that any pornography would be found in his home, though there was information that one clip of adult pornography was seen in the home months earlier by one (or perhaps more than one) high school student. That information, however, was stale.