Court Links Dispatcher, 4th Amendment Violation

The New Jersey Supreme Court has tossed out the guilty plea of a man arrested on drug charges, saying a Millville police dispatcher violated the man’s 4th Amendment rights by giving the arresting officer incorrect information that the man had a warrant. The court’s decision extends application of the exclusionary rule further up the chain of law enforcement to include dispatchers on whom officers rely for arrest information. Previously, cases involving officers operating in good faith but on bad information were generally upheld by the courts. In this case, the court was particularly harsh, saying the dispatcher was “plainly unreasonable” in failing to take further investigative steps to confirm the warrant. As a result, the exclusionary rule applies and the drugs were excluded as evidence.

The decision stems from a 2005 pedestrian stop by a Milltown officer, who then radioed in a name to an unnamed dispatcher for warrants. The dispatcher entered the information into the computer and received at least one hit, and he/she then confirmed a warrant to the officer. The suspect was arrested and searched, and the officer found drugs. The suspect was brought to the station.

At that point, the officer compared the warrant information with the suspect’s ID and discovered only the last name matched—the first name was spelled differently, the middle initial was different, the date-of-birth was different, and the warrant was 10 years old. The officer dropped the warrant charge, but did charge the suspect with possession of drugs.

The suspect appealed, claiming the search was invalid because the warrant match was incorrect. An appeals court upheld the trial court’s ruling, and the suspect then appealed to the Supreme Court. Download (pdf) the court’s decision here.