Search Warrant Judge Must be Informed if the Police Know or Have Reason to Know That the Place to be Searched is a Multiunit Dwelling

No SCOID opinions this week, but the COA issued three opinions. Two of them involve post-conviction petitions, the statute of limitations, and equitable tolling. Those are discussed in Deborah's post below.

In the third case, State v. Reynolds, police officers and emergency personnel responded to a call that a two year old child had died in a house where several people rented separate rooms within what appeared to be a single family home. Police found drug paraphernalia in the room of the parents and "smelled the odor of growing marijuana." In this house, each tenant had a separately keyed room and only shared common areas. The police obtained a warrant without telling the judge that there were separate living quarters. The district court denied Mr. Reynolds's motion to suppress.

The COA said while there is no direct Idaho precedent, "the general rule is that a warrant authorizing the search of a multiunit structure will be invalidated if it does not identify the subunit to be searched with sufficient particularity to preclude a search of other units in the same building occupied by innocent persons. Therefore, if officers know or should know that there are multiple, separate dwelling units, they must exclude from a requested warrant those units that are not under suspicion."

The district court "concluded that the officer did not know, nor should he have known, that the home was in fact a multiunit structure and not a single-family residence." The COA deferred to this finding and affirmed the judgment.

State v. Reynolds, http://www.isc.idaho.gov/opinions/Reynolds-opn.pdf