In United States v. Manaku, --- F4th ---, No. 20-10069 (9th Cir. 2022), the Court affirmed the district court’s denial of Grant Manaku’s pretrial motion to suppress evidence, which asserted that FBI agents executing a search warrant at his residence deliberately violated Fed. R. Crim. P. 41(f)(1)(C) by failing to supply a complete copy of the warrant.
The Court explained, under Rule 41, "the officer executing the warrant 'must give a copy of the warrant and a receipt for the property taken to the person from whom, or from whose premises, the property was taken or leave a copy of the warrant and receipt at the place where the officer took the property.' Fed. R. Crim. P. 41(f)(1)(C)."
"Here, by providing only the face page of the warrant without its attachments, the FBI violated Rule 41(f)(1)(C)'s requirement to deliver a complete copy of the warrant. When a search warrant relies on attachments to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the warrant describe with particularity 'the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,' U.S. Const. amend. IV, those attachments form an essential part of the warrant and must be delivered with the warrant under Rule 41(d)."
"A Rule 41 violation in the execution of a search warrant, however, does not necessarily mean that the evidence seized during that search must be suppressed. Suppression is automatic only for “fundamental” violations of Rule 41, at least without any applicable exception to the exclusionary rule. Id. at 1115. We have described such “fundamental” violations of Rule 41 as “those that result in clear constitutional violations.” Any other violations of the rule are “technical errors” that “require suppression only if the defendant can show either that (1) he was prejudiced by the error, or (2) there is evidence of ‘deliberate disregard of the rule.’”
"Manaku contends neither that the violation here was fundamental nor that he was prejudiced by it. This is not, for example, a case in which the agents delivered an incomplete warrant after searching places not authorized by the warrant or seizing items not specified in it. The only remaining question, therefore, is whether the district court correctly concluded that the agents’ failure to deliver a complete copy of the warrant at the completion of the search was merely negligent, rather than the product of a “deliberate disregard of the rule.” We find no error in the district court’s conclusion."
