MARIJUANA/POT ATTORNEY IN BERGEN (HACKENSACK), PASSAIC (PATERSON) AND MORRIS (MORRISTOWN) COUNTIES: CAN FAULTY INFORMATION INVALIDATE A WARRANTLESS SEARCH?

In the first week of December 2010, New Jersey’s Supreme Court entertained oral arguments pointed to a warrantless search grounded upon faulty information provided by a police dispatcher.

The defendant in the case was one of a number of people stopped by a local law enforcement agent for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. During the stop, the investigating officer called the police dispatcher to obtain profile information relative to each of the bicycle riders. The dispatcher told the investigating police officer that the defendant had an open warrant in another town for driving with a false driver’s license. Resultantly, the investigating police officer arrested the defendant and in the process, he located crack cocaine and marijuana on the suspect’s person.

Unfortunately, the dispatcher failed to tell the investigating police officer that the individual with the open arrest warrant had a  first name that differed in spelling from that of defendant, that they had different dates of birth and that the person subject of the open warrant lived in Los Angeles.

Ultimately, defendant pled guilty to the criminal offenses and reserved his right to appeal the Fourth Amendment issue. An appellate court reversed a trial court’s decision to suppress the evidence under the Fourth Amendment noting that New Jersey does not have a “good-faith exception” to the exclusionary rule and specifically concluded that “the exclusionary rule must be applied beyond the officer in the field and to police employees who acts unreasonably in applying critical, but inaccurate or incomplete information”.

Oral arguments were presented to the Supreme Court on December 1, 2010. The questions pointed to the litigants by the Court seemed to focus on whether a mistake, consistent with the one in the case before the court, was sufficient to trigger the exclusionary rule.