Tenth Holds No PC Supported Package Search, But There Was Just Enough to Justify Good Faith Reliance on Warrant

U.S. v. Reed, 2006 WL 3441532 (11/30/06)(unpub'd) - There was no probable cause to issue a warrant to search a package under the following circumstances:the package was sent priority overnight, person to person, paid for in cash, the airbill was handwritten, (which only happens 3 or 4 percent of the time) and it came for California, a drug source state; the officer had previously intercepted a package with similar characteristics and found counterfeit credit cards; a drug dog did not alert on that package or on the one in this case; the recipient of the package was a known career criminal, including for forgery and fraud; packages with the same courier characteristics had contained contraband; and based on the officer's experience he believed the package contained contraband. The characteristics of the package were not unusual enough or incriminating enough to indicate criminality. The fact that the defendant was a career criminal did not mean every package sent to him contained contraband, especially since there was no indication his prior offenses included using the mails. However, the officer acted in good faith reliance on the warrant, although "this case stretches Leon's good faith exception to its elastic limit ." "But, a minimal (barely)[the 10th's parenthetical] nexus existed between the place searched, Reed and the suspected criminal activity."