State of New Jersey v. Carlene Harris and Norman A. Thomas 4th

Summary

The New Jersey Appellate Division affirmed the suppression of evidence obtained under search warrants supported by a certification that repeatedly listed controlled-buy dates as occurring in 2022, rendering the information stale when the warrants issued in March 2023. The court held that the issuing judge and reviewing courts could not correct the dates as typographical errors or consider extrinsic evidence not presented in the warrant application.

Holdings

1. A reviewing court may disregard an immediately apparent clerical error when the drafter's intended meaning is obvious, but it may not replace dates in a warrant certification when the alleged errors are not evident from the document and the dates are critical to probable cause.
2. A reviewing court must determine probable cause solely from the information presented to the issuing judge in the warrant application, generally limited to the four corners of the affidavit or certification and any contemporaneously recorded sworn testimony.
3. The certification did not establish probable cause because, read as written, it relied on two controlled buys occurring in February 2022, and probable cause cannot be based on stale information.
4. The State was not entitled to an evidentiary hearing to introduce extrinsic evidence proving that the certification's dates were wrong.

Questions Presented

1. Whether the reviewing court could treat three dates in the warrant certification as typographical errors when nothing within the certification made the intended dates apparent.
2. Whether probable cause for the warrants could be established by considering extrinsic evidence or information not presented to the issuing judge.
3. Whether the 2022 dates rendered the information supporting the warrants stale and thereby required suppression of the seized evidence.
4. Whether the State was entitled to an evidentiary hearing under Rule 3:5-7(c) to prove that the certification contained erroneous dates.

Disposition

affirmed