Last Thursday, Indiana's highest court made it official, ruling that the search warrant that allowed police to recover Heuring's meth was illegal. The police had no more than a hunch that Heuring had removed the device, the court said, and that wasn't enough to get a search warrant.Even if the police could have proved that Heuring had removed the device, that wouldn't prove he stole it, the high court said. It's hard to "steal" something if you have no idea to whom it belongs. Classifying his action as theft would lead to absurd results, the court noted.
"To find a fair probability of unauthorized control here, we would need to conclude the Hoosiers don't have the authority to remove unknown, unmarked objects from their personal vehicles," Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote for a unanimous court.
The high court's ruling has big implications for Heuring's case. Under a principle known as the exclusionary rule, evidence uncovered using an invalid search warrant is excluded from trial. Without the meth recovered in this search, prosecutors might not have enough evidence to mount a case against him.
The law allows a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule in some cases where police rely on a warrant that later proves defective. But Justice Rush concluded that exception doesn't apply here.
"We find it reckless for an officer-affiant to search a suspect's home and his father's barn based on nothing more than a hunch that a crime has been committed," the court wrote. "We are confident that applying the exclusionary rule here will deter similar reckless conduct in the future."