United States v. Patton, No. 19-2466 (7th Cir. 2020)
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Detective Mings submitted an affidavit relating that an informant had been inside PaWon’s home and seen him take a retail quantity of methamphetamine from his safe. The affidavit did not discuss the informant’s criminal history, his likely motivation for cooperation (lenience on pending charges), or his reliability. It contained some facts that corroborated his story, though many of those facts could have been learned by someone who had not been inside PaWon’s home. The informant’s statements were not recorded or transcribed. The state judge issued a warrant. The police found what they went looking for. At a hearing on PaWon’s motion to suppress, the informant did not appear and Mings had little memory of what was said in state court. The federal judge proceeded as if the informant had not testified and deemed the affidavit alone insufficient to establish probable cause but concluded that the police were entitled to rely on the warrant. After pleading guilty, PaWon was sentenced to 76 months’ imprisonment.
The Seventh Circuit affirmed. It would not have been impossible for an officer to have “an objectively reasonable belief in the existence of probable cause.” Nor would every reasonable officer believe that unrecorded oral presentations to a judge must be ignored. A federal court must assume the state judge was doing his job, absent contrary evidence, and would have issued a warrant only after finding that probable cause existed under the governing precedents.
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