Wheeler v. State

• Decision Date: 10 February 2021
• Docket Number: NO. PD-0388-19,PD-0388-19
• Citation: 616 S.W.3d 858
• Parties: Chase Erick WHEELER, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

616 S.W.3d 858

Chase Erick WHEELER, Appellant

v.The STATE of Texas

NO. PD-0388-19

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

Delivered: February 10, 2021

OPINION

Slaughter, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which Richardson, Yeary, Newell, Walker, and McClure, JJ., joined.

In applying for a blood-alcohol search warrant, a police officer submitted an unsworn probable-cause affidavit. Finding that the affidavit articulated probable cause but not realizing that it was unsworn, the magistrate signed and returned the search warrant. The same police officer then executed that search warrant. There is no question that the officer's failure to take the oath and swear to his probable-cause affidavit was improper. The question is whether despite this defect and assuming a valid warrant issued, the good-faith exception to the Texas exclusionary rule¹ applies such that the blood-alcohol evidence is admissible. We hold that, under the facts of this case, the good-faith exception is inapplicable and the evidence is subject to suppression. We agree with the court of appeals that the officer in this case was objectively unreasonable in executing a search warrant he knew was unsupported by a sworn probable-cause affidavit, such that he cannot be said to have acted in objective good-faith reliance upon the warrant. Therefore, we affirm the judgment of the court of appeals.

I. Background

The facts of this case are largely undisputed. Early on the morning of July 9, 2016, Officer Tyler Bonner, the sole officer on duty for the Pantego Police Department, arrested Appellant, Chase Erick Wheeler, for driving while intoxicated. Wheeler refused to submit to field sobriety tests and also refused a blood or breath test. As such, Bonner took Wheeler to the police department to obtain a search warrant for Wheeler's blood.

A. The search warrant

In applying for the search warrant, Bonner used preprinted, fill-in-the-blank/check-the-box forms for the probable-cause affidavit, search warrant, return, and an order for assistance. The probable-cause affidavit form included statements indicating that an oath was required and must be sworn before another person.² The jurat provided: "Subscribed and sworn to before me on this 9 day of July, 2016, by an official authorized to administer and authorize this oath pursuant to TEX. GOV'T CODE § 602.002." Despite the recital in the jurat, Bonner never swore to the affidavit before anyone. Instead, he merely signed the affidavit on the line immediately above the jurat labeled "affiant," filled in the blanks for the date in the jurat, and gave it to the dispatcher, leaving the signature for the jurat blank.³ The dispatcher then electronically submitted the documents to the magistrate, Sara Jane Del Carmen. Del Carmen, not realizing that the affidavit was unsworn, signed the jurat and the search warrant.⁴ Bonner then executed the warrant.⁵

B. Motion to Suppress

After being charged with driving while intoxicated, Wheeler filed a motion to suppress the blood-alcohol evidence. He argued that because Bonner's affidavit was not sworn under oath as required by the Texas Constitution and Code of Criminal Procedure,⁶ it must be excluded pursuant to the Texas Exclusionary Rule in Code of Criminal Procedure Article 38.23(a). At the hearing on Appellant's motion to suppress, Bonner admitted that he did not swear an oath before Magistrate Del Carmen or anyone else. But, he claimed that he believed an oath was not required pursuant to Pantego Police Department policy. Bonner testified that in the fourteen months he had been employed with the Pantego Police Department, he had not sworn to a single probable-cause affidavit. Bonner also stated that he understood that the facts in his affidavit were not properly sworn but that he was not aware of any defects in the warrant and believed it to be valid at the time of execution.

Additionally, Bonner admitted that in the police academy (from which he had graduated only fourteen months prior to this incident) he learned about the Constitution and laws pertaining to searches and seizures. He stated that he received specific training on the requirements of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment and the Texas Constitution's Article I, Section 9. He also acknowledged that as part of this training, he was instructed that officers must swear an oath before a qualified individual when submitting a probable-cause affidavit to obtain a search warrant.

Del Carmen also testified at the motion to suppress hearing. She indicated that in her experience as a magistrate working with the Pantego Police Department, an officer typically would swear the oath in front of another officer. The officer accepting the oath would write his/her badge number next to the signature line on the probable-cause affidavit to indicate that it had been sworn. In this case, Del Carmen failed to realize that there was no officer's badge number or notary's stamp on Bonner's affidavit, thus she signed the warrant even though the affidavit was unsworn. Del Carmen acknowledged that she was mistaken in signing the jurat and warrant based on the unsworn probable-cause affidavit. But at the time she believed Bonner's affidavit established probable cause and did not notice any defects in the affidavit.

After hearing the evidence, the trial court denied the motion, stating that this situation fell within the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule under Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 38.23(b). Based on the denial of his motion to suppress, Appellant pleaded guilty and then appealed the trial court's ruling.

C. Court of Appeals

The court of appeals reversed the trial court's denial of Appellant's motion to suppress. Wheeler v. State , 573 S.W.3d 437, 446 (Tex. App.—Fort Worth 2019). The State had argued on appeal that the oath recitation in the affidavit's and warrant's preambles were sufficient to support a finding that the oath requirement had been satisfied. The court of appeals, however, disagreed. It reasoned that the evidence failed to show that Bonner signed the affidavit with " ‘a sense of seriousness and responsibility’ or with a ‘sense of [his] moral duty to tell the truth,’ " such that it could not find that the purposes of the oath had been satisfied. Id. at 443 (quoting Smith v. State , 207 S.W.3d 787, 790 (Tex. Crim. App. 2006) ). This, coupled with the affirmative evidence from Del Carmen and Bonner that no oath or its equivalent actually occurred, foreclosed a finding that the oath requirement had been satisfied. Id. at 443-44. Thus, the court of appeals held the warrant was defective and proceeded to consider whether the good-faith exception applied. In concluding that it did not, the court reasoned that Officer Bonner was objectively unreasonable in relying on a warrant he knew was based on an unsworn affidavit. Id. at 446. Relying primarily on this Court's decision in McClintock v. State , the court of appeals explained:

No objectively reasonable officer could believe that sworn affidavits are not required in seeking search warrants. Indeed, they are "indispensable." Bonner's submission of an unsworn affidavit was not close to the line of validity; therefore, an objectively reasonable officer preparing such an affidavit could not have believed that the subsequent warrant was not tainted by the complete absence of this constitutional and statutory requirement. Because Bonner's failure to swear to the truth of his affidavit facts is a long-distance call away from the line of validity, he could not have acted in good-faith reliance on the issued warrant.

Id. (citing Clay v. State , 391 S.W.3d 94, 97-98 (Tex. Crim. App. 2013) ; McClintock v. State, 541 S.W.3d 63, 73 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017) ).

After determining that the trial court had erred in denying Appellant's motion to suppress, the court of appeals performed a harm analysis, found the error harmful, and reversed and remanded the case back to the trial court. Id. The State then filed a petition for discretionary review with this Court, which we granted on a single ground to consider the court of appeals’ conclusion that the good-faith exception was inapplicable.⁷

II. Analysis

Under the Texas Exclusionary Rule, evidence obtained in violation of any provision of state or federal law cannot be used at trial in a criminal prosecution.⁸ There is, however, an exception to this exclusionary rule for evidence "obtained by a law enforcement officer acting in objective good faith reliance upon a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate based on probable cause." TEX. CODE CRIM. PROC. art. 38.23(b). The exception plainly requires objective, rather than subjective, good-faith reliance upon a search warrant. We agree with the court of appeals that, applying this objective standard to the facts here, this requirement was not met because no objectively-reasonable officer would execute a search warrant knowing that it was procured through an unsworn probable-cause affidavit. Accordingly, the good-faith exception does not apply and the statutory exclusionary rule prohibits admission of the blood evidence that was obtained in violation of Texas law.

A. A sworn probable-cause affidavit is a critical requirement under Texas law.

One of the most fundamental tenets of search and seizure law is that a search warrant must be supported by a probable-cause affidavit that is sworn "by oath or affirmation." TEX. CONST. art. I, § 9. This oath or affirmation requirement is so critical that our Legislature codified it numerous times in the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. See TEX. CODE CRIM. PROC. art. 1.06 ("No warrant to search any place or to seize any person or thing shall issue without ... probable cause supported by oath or affirmation."); art. 18.01(b) ("A sworn affidavit setting forth substantial facts establishing probable cause shall be filed in every instance in which a search warrant is requested."); art. 18.01(b-1)(1) ("The magistrate may examine an applicant for a...