United States v. David W. Stubbs

The United States appeals the district court’s order suppressing evidence seized pursuant to a search warrant from David W. Stubbs’s business, Dave Stubbs Real Estate, Inc. We affirm.

The Fourth Amendment requires that a warrant sufficiently describe items which may be seized. The “description must be specific enough to enable the person conducting the search reasonably to identify the things authorized to be seized.” United States v. Spilotro, 800 F.2d 959, 963 (9th Cir.1986). In determining whether a description is sufficiently precise, we have focused on one or more of the following:

Id. at 963 (citations omitted).

We find an absence of probable cause to seize all documents in Stubbs’s office. The affidavit fails to provide probable cause for a reasonable belief that tax evasion permeated Stubbs’s entire real estate business. Instead, the affidavit details certain aspects of the operation which were used to evade taxes.

Because there was not probable cause to seize all documents in Stubbs’s office, the warrant was defective in that it did not provide objective standards by which an executing officer could determine what could be seized. At oral argument, the government…