Reasonable Inferences From Search Warrant Application Established Probable Cause to Search Defendant’s Residence for Gun & Narcotics

State v. Yarbrough, Minn.S.Ct., 1/8/2014.  Mr. Yarbrough allegedly threatened a woman in a public park for stealing “a large amount” of his drugs.  He brandished a handgun to threaten her.  He then left in a maroon Caprice driven by and registered to Mr. Yarbrough’s roommate.  Police located the Caprice parked in the rear of an apartment building where the roommate lived.  Meantime, a snitch told police that Mr. Yarbrough was a drug dealer and carried a handgun.  Police also learned that Mr. Yarbrough had been arrested with this roommate a few months earlier for possession of narcotics with intent to distribute.  Police presented this information in an application for a search warrant to search the apartment, the Caprice and Mr. Yarbrough for the usual laundry list of stuff, including firearms, ammunition and narcotics.  When the officers executed the search warrant they found a large amount of cash, a handgun that matched the description of the gun that Mr. Yarbrough had allegedly “brandished,” ammunition, and drugs.

In the ensuring criminal prosecution Mr. Yarbrough moved to suppress all this evidence, on the theory that the affidavit failed to establish a sufficient nexus between Mr. Yarbrough’s alleged criminal activity and the apartment.  The trial court granted that motion.  The court of appeals reversed, concluding that it was reasonable to infer that Mr. Yarbrough would keep the handgun at the apartment.  Read about that here.  That established probable cause to search the apartment for the gun.  The court of appeals then said that under the “plain view” doctrine, it was okay to have seized the ammunition and narcotics.

Writing  his first criminal opinion for a unanimous court, Justice Lillehaug affirmed the result reached by the court of appeals.  The court thought that the search warrant application established probable cause to search for the gun, the ammunition and the narcotics, and thus did not resort to “plain view” to uphold the seizure of the ammunition and narcotics. 

The court agrees that a sufficient “nexus” must exist between the evidence sought and the place to be searched, but says that this “nexus” may be inferred from the totality of the circumstances.  Generally speaking, the court says that it is reasonable to infer that “gun evidence” would be kept at a defendant’s residence; the same would be true for bullets.  For drug evidence, the court’s general observation, a real head scratcher, is that it would be reasonable to infer that a drug wholesaler keeps drugs at his residence but that it would not be reasonable to draw that inference for the casual user. 

So, for guns, bullets, and dealers, the default inference is that this stuff is at a defendant’s crib.  The court cautions that the officer still needs to dress up these default inferences with enough information to create a “substantial factual basis” to support them.  For guns,  such information must go beyond saying that a defendant was just out and about with a gun since it’s legal in Minnesota to do just that.  The court concludes, in this instance, that the warrant application established a sufficient nexus – and thus probable cause – to support the search for “gun evidence” and narcotics.  Having reached that conclusion the court does not adopt the court of appeals’ “plain view” analysis.