People v. Tuadles

I concur in the affirmance of Tuadles’s conviction but I respectfully dissent from the affirmance of Mercado’s. In my view the affidavit did not establish probable cause for the search of Mercado’s home and a reasonable, well-trained police officer would have known this.

*1786Because the search warrant has produced the intended result or the case would not be here, it is always tempting to find probable cause by reasoning backward from the seizure of the evidence to the contents of the affidavit. We can then credit discovery of the damning evidence not to a hunch but to the officer’s “extensive…