UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. LAMARCUS THOMAS
US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Harris, November 8, 2018,
Search-Warrant – An officer executes a search-warrant in good faith where he has enough evidence to establish probable cause but unintentionally fails to put enough of it into the search-warrant application.

Facts:
In 2014, Virginia police received information that Lamarcus Thomas had sexually assaulted a minor. Police met with the victim’s mother, who stated that Thomas had sexually assaulted her sons while watching them. This was confirmed by the sons. One of the children explained that, after fondling him, Thomas texted and called the child’s mother to arrange further sleepovers.
Coleman was subsequently interrogated and confessed. A warrant was obtained for him for Virginia’s aggravated sexual battery law and he was placed under arrest. Search incident to arrest, a cell-phone was recovered from Thomas’ pocket.
One of the detectives applied for a search warrant for the phone. The affidavit explained that Thomas was arrested on a warrant for aggravated sexual battery, but did not include the date of the alleged offense. The affidavit also did not include information about Thomas’ use of a cell-phone to contact the boys’ mother.
The warrant was issued and resulted in discovery of sexually explicit images and videos involving children.
Prior to trial, Thomas moved to suppress the evidence recovered from the cell-phone.
Thomas was convicted and appealed, arguing that the search-warrant was improperly issued because: it didn’t link the crime to the phone and was stale because the affidavit didn’t explain when the crime occurred.

Held: The Court held that because police knew more than they included in the warrant, they acted in good faith.

Good Faith – Evidence recovered after police execute a search-warrant in good faith may be admitted at trial, even if the search-warrant is later invalidated.

Good Faith – A search-warrant is not executed in “good faith” if it is “so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable.”

Good Faith – Mistakenly leaving evidence supporting probable-cause out of a search-warrant application will not necessarily defeat a finding that the officer executed the warrant in good faith

Note: This does NOT apply to leaving out evidence that would defeat a finding of probable cause. Leaving that information out will be seen as an attempt to mislead the judge.

Good Faith – “When a warrant is invalidated only because an officer mistakenly omitted information necessary to establish probable cause, application of the exclusionary rule can have little, if any, deterrent effect.”

From the Case: “Any error appears to have resulted from a simple miscalculation by Coleman as to how much of what he knew he needed to include in his affidavit to show probable cause. That is not the kind of deliberate misconduct that the exclusionary rule was intended to deter.”