State’s high court reverses, remands interlocutory appeal centering on urine test

The Supreme Court of Missouri has reversed and remanded a case from the Circuit Court of Cass County after the state challenged the lower court’s decision to repress the test results of a urine sample.

At the heart of the appeal is a criminal case against Israel Barrera, who in 2021, was arrested for molesting a 14-year-old girl.

After Barrera was taken into custody, pursuant to a warrant, officers seized a urine sample and buccal swab, according to the court. Two weeks later, it was discovered that the sample was improperly preserved and unusable for testing.

A day later, a detective “simultaneously filed two separate warrant applications, one for warrant 1 and the other for warrant 2. The application for warrant 1 sought to seize another urine sample from Barrera, and the application for warrant 2 sought to test the urine seized pursuant to warrant 1,” the court said.

A judge issued both warrants and the same day, law enforcement officers seized a urine sample and submitted it for testing. Barrera’s urine tested positive for the STD the 14-year-old victim contracted.

During Barrera’s criminal trial, he moved to suppress the results of the urine test results.

“The circuit court first found warrant 2 was unnecessary because warrant 1 authorized both the seizure and search of the urine pursuant to State v. Swartz. Accordingly, the circuit court found any challenge to warrant 2 irrelevant and moot, limited its analysis to warrant 1, and found the affidavit failed to establish probable cause to seize and test the urine sample,” according to court documents. “The circuit court further held the good-faith reliance exception to the exclusionary rule did not apply because the affidavit was so lacking in indicia of probable cause that a well-trained officer would not reasonably rely on it. The circuit court sustained Barrera’s motion to suppress the urine test results.”

The state filed an interlocutory appeal, bringing the matter before the state’s supreme court.  In its appeal, the state argued the lower court erred in its decision to suppress the test results “because the issuing judge had a substantial basis to conclude warrant 1 was supported by probable cause.”

Barrera countered and the lower court agreed that the judge who issued the warrant could not properly rely on the affidavit stating law enforcement received a report that Barrera molested the victim because as Barerra claimed, it provided “no basis for the reliability or credibility of this hearsay report.”

“This information, however, is not the only way to determine reliability or credibility in a totality-of-the circumstances analysis,” the state supreme court wrote in its opinion.

The court cited State v. Baker, which concluded: “An affidavit that relies on hearsay is sufficient to support a finding of probable cause if there is a substantial basis for crediting the hearsay.”

An informant’s “veracity” and “basis of knowledge” should not be considered elements that must be independently verified, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified.

Instead, they “are better understood as relevant considerations in the totality-of-the-circumstances analysis that traditionally has guided probable cause determinations: a deficiency in one may be compensated for, in determining the overall reliability of a tip, by a strong showing as to the other, or by some other indicia of reliability,” this court explained in its opinion.

Another indicium of “reliability of value in the totality of the circumstances analysis” is the corroboration of report details by independent police work. This includes medical exams like the one the victim underwent where her STD was discovered.

With these considerations in mind, this court found that the circuit court failed to fully weigh the corroborative details in the affidavit.

Barrera argued that even with credit given to the report, the affidavit didn’t include enough information to support a finding of probable cause. The judges rebutted this saying it holds the state to a higher standard than the Fourth Amendment requires.

“If Victim had the STD, was molested by Barrera, and had no other consensual partners, common sense dictates there is at least a fair probability the STD would be found in Barrera’s urine,” Judge Robin Ransom wrote in the court’s opinion. “When read together in a non-hypertechnical manner, the facts in the affidavit provided a substantial basis for the issuing judge to have found probable cause to order the seizure and search of Barrera’s urine. The issuing judge did not clearly err in this determination.”

The court unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision and remanded it for further proceedings.

The case is:  State of Missouri v. Israel Barrera, Case no. SC101178.