LaMarcus Thomas v. United States

The good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule allows the admission of illegally obtained evidence if “the officers’ reliance on the magistrate’s determination of probable cause was objectively reasonable.” United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 926 (1984). What information may be considered in determining whether the officer’s reliance was reasonable “is a question that has split [the] circuits.” United States v. Knox, 883 F.3d 1262, 1271 (10th Cir. 2018). The question presented is: Whether a suppression court may consider (1) only information contained within the four corners of the warrant application, as the Ninth Circuit, Colorado, Maryland and South Carolina hold; (2) only that information plus any other information presented to the issuing magistrate at the time of the warrant application, as the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits hold; or (3) all information known by the officer at the time she applied for the warrant, even if she never disclosed it to the magistrate, as the Fourth, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuits and Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Virginia hold— and further, even if, as the Fourth Circuit holds, the officer failed to disclose the information as a result of a departmental policy.