570
Kennedy, J., dissenting
there were two apartments on the third floor and obtained a warrant to search the entire floor); Arizona v. Evans, 514 U. S. 1 (1995) (person wrongly arrested and searched because a court employee's clerical error led officer to believe a warrant existed for person's arrest); McCleary v. Navarro, 504 U. S. 966 (1992) (White, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (house wrongly searched because informant told officers the suspect lived in the second house on the right, but the suspect lived in the third house on the right).
The language the Court quotes from Leon comes from a discussion of when "an officer [who] has obtained a [defective] warrant and abided by its terms" has acted reasonably. 468 U. S., at 922. The discussion notes that there are some cases in which "no reasonably well trained officer should rely on the warrant." Id., at 923. The passage also includes several examples, among them the one that the Court relies on in this case: "[D]epending on the circumstances of the particular case, a warrant may be so facially deficient—i.e., in failing to particularize the place to be searched or the things to be seized—that the executing officers cannot reasonably presume it to be valid." Ibid.
The Court interprets this language to mean that a clerical mistake can be so obvious that an officer who fails to recognize the mistake should not receive qualified immunity. Read in context, however, the quoted language is addressed to a quite different issue. The most natural interpretation of the language is that a clerical mistake can be so obvious that the officer cannot reasonably rely on the mistake in the course of executing the warrant. In other words, a defect can be so clear that an officer cannot reasonably "abid[e] by its terms" and execute the warrant as written. Id., at 922.
We confront no such issue here, of course. No one suggests that the officer reasonably could have relied on the defective language in the warrant. This is a case about an officer being unaware of a clerical error, not a case about an officer relying on one. The respondents do not make the
Page: Index Previous 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007