Officer Harold Cheirs and his partner, Officer Robinson, tried to serve an arrest warrant on Phyllis Brown at 3171 Hendricks Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. When they got to Hendricks Avenue, they could not find a house with a 3171 address. They eventually found two houses on opposite sides of the street with a 3170 address, at which point, you might say, they were getting warmer. One of the houses presumably was mislabeled, and the officers had several options at their fingertips to figure out which house was 3171 Hendricks and which was not. They could have determined which side of the street contained odd-numbered addresses and served the warrant on the “3170” address on that side of the street. They could have checked city records or for that matter Google Maps to identify which house was the right one. Or they could have gone up to one of the houses and asked an occupant which house was 3171 Hendricks and which one was 3170 Hendricks.
The officers picked the last option—in part. Noticing that one of the two houses was occupied, they proceeded to that one. Now they were getting colder. Officer Cheirs knocked, a woman answered, and she promptly shut the door. While Officer Robinson went to the back of the house, Officer Cheirs knocked again. The occupant eventually opened the door, though not for seven or eight minutes. Instead of asking the woman what the address of the house was, whether Phyllis Brown lived there or whether this was the odd-numbered side of the street, Officer Cheirs represented to the woman that he had a warrant “for this address.” False. He had a warrant for 3171 Hendricks, and this was 3170 Hendricks.
Having no reason to know that this representation was false and opting not to insist on looking at the warrant, the woman let the officers into the house—the house of Phyllis Brown’s hapless neighbor, Steven Shaw. The officers performed a protective sweep of the house. Instead of finding Brown, they found a lot of cocaine. They arrested Shaw, and a grand jury charged him with a battery of drug-dealing and drug-possession offenses. The district court denied Shaw’s motion to suppress the drugs found at his house. He pled guilty to distributing cocaine, see21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), all the while reserving the right to appeal the suppression ruling. The district court sentenced him to 126 months in prison.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S. Const. amend. IV. That means, among treatises full of other requirements, that officers must “take steps to reasonably ensure” they are not entering the wrong home when they execute an arrest warrant. El Bey v. Roop,530 F.3d 407, 416 (6th Cir.2008); see Steagald v. United States,451 U.S. 204, 216, 101 S.Ct. 1642, 68 L.Ed.2d 38 (1981); Payton v. New York,445 U.S. 573, 603, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980); United States v. Pruitt,458 F.3d 477, 480 (6th Cir.2006).
An officer may not falsely tell a homeowner that he has an arrest warrant for a house, then use that falsity as the basis for obtaining entry into the house.
The Supreme Court has said as much. Forty-five years ago, it faced this question: whether “a search can be justified as lawful on the basis of consent when that ‘consent’ has been given only after the official conducting the search has asserted that he possesses a warrant” when he does not? The answer was no. Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U.S. 543, 546–51, 88 S.Ct. 1788, 20 L.Ed.2d 797 (1968); see also United States v. Escobar, 389 F.3d 781, 786 (8th Cir.2004) (holding that officers may not obtain consent to search through a “false claim of legal authority”). The equivalent is true here.
Read full case here: United States v. Shaw, 707 F.3d 666 (6th Cir. 2013), https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-shaw-18/
Anton Vialtsin, Esq.
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