Miguel Rafael Rayos, Jr. v. United States

I. In United States v. Leon, this Court announced a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule. 468 U.S. 897, 922-23 (1984). “[T]he marginal or nonexistent benefits produced by suppressing evidence obtained in objectively reasonable reliance on a subsequently invalidated search warrant,” this Court explained, “cannot justify the substantial costs of exclusion.” Id. at 922. Suppression would nevertheless be appropriate where a police officer secured and executed a warrant “based on an affidavit ‘so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable.’” See id. at 923 (quoting Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 610-11 (1975) (Powell, J., concurring)). The courts of appeals have split on whether an affidavit with some facts, rather than none, qualifies as “bare bones” under Leon. According to the Fifth Circuit, “’[b]are bones affidavits” are those that “contain wholly conclusory statements.’” United States v. Morton, 46 F.4th 331, 336 (5th Cir. 2022) (en banc) (quoting United States v. Satterwhite, 980 F.2d 317, 321 (5th Cir. 1992)). The Fifth Circuit relied on this all-or-nothing analysis below to reject the good-faith argument raised by Mr. Rayos. Since the affidavit included some facts, rather than an unadorned conclusion, Mr. Rayos lost. Other circuit courts of appeals have adopted a more nuanced approach to the barebones analysis and ask whether the case-specific facts from the affidavit actually put meat on the bone, rather than useless fat. See United States v. Vigeant, 176 F.3d 565, 574 (1st Cir. 1999) (citing United States v. Weber, 923 F.3d 1338, 1346 (9th Cir. 1990)); Weber, 923 F.3d at 1346 (citing Leon, 468 U.S. at 926). The question presented is this: whether the Fifth Circuit has misapplied Leon by adopting an all-or-nothing approach to the bare-bones analysis.