Denver Case Highlights the Potentially Deadly Hazards of Police Raids Based on Secondhand Information
On a Friday night in March 2023, Sean Horan called 911 to report that Michael Mendenhall, who runs a staffing agency out of a converted townhouse on Blake Street in Denver, had threatened him with a baseball bat. Based on nothing more than Horan’s one-sided account of a confrontation at Mendenhall’s townhouse, police officers arrested Mendenhall for felony menacing. To support that charge, Detective Nicholas Rocco-McKeel obtained a search warrant by repeating what another officer told him Horan had said. During the ensuing search of the townhouse, police seized the baseball bat as evidence.
Prosecutors dropped the case against Mendenhall less than a week later, and it is not hard to see why: Horan’s account of what had happened was inconsistent and improbable. But police never returned the bat, which was a valuable collector’s item because it was signed by players at the 2021 Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Denver. That purloined bat is at the center of a case that aims to overturn a controversial 1960 Supreme Court precedent allowing home searches based on hearsay. Mendenhall argues that the warrant authorizing the search of his property was invalid under the Fourth Amendment because it relied on thirdhand information rather than Rocco-McKeel’s personal knowledge.
“The Fourth Amendment must be enforced in its entirety,” says Anya Bidwell, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represents Mendenhall. Although “the Fourth Amendment bans reliance on second-hand information,” she says, “the courts have read that requirement out of the Constitution. We’re fighting to bring back the original understanding of this very important protection.”
Issuing a warrant “is no trivial thing,” a brief that Mendenhall recently filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit notes. “Warrants authorize armed government agents to seize persons or comb through their most private spaces. Warrants authorize the government to employ violence to accomplish these goals. There is hardly ever a situation in which the individual is more powerless before the State than when its agents arrive armed with a warrant.” Although no one was injured in Mendenhall’s case, briefs supporting his appeal note that the consequences of hearsay-based warrants can be lethal, as illustrated by the 2020 death of Breonna Taylor.
The circumstances that led to the search of Mendenhall’s townhouse suggest the hazards of allowing police invasions of private property based on secondhand information. Around 10 p.m. on March 10, 2023, according to Mendenhall’s brief, he was “relaxing after work at the townhouse with a friend when he heard women screaming and a man yelling just outside his front door.” Concerned for the women’s safety, Mendenhall grabbed his commemorative bat and “opened the door to investigate.” He saw “a strange and shabbily dressed man,” later identified as Horan, sitting on the stoop of the townhouse with two dogs and “yelling at a group of women.”
When Mendenhall asked Horan to leave, the brief says, Horan “refused and threatened to call the police.” He followed through on that threat after Mendenhall went back inside. When four police officers arrived at the townhouse around 11 p.m., Horan, who lived about 50 miles away, told them he was taking a walk when he stopped to rest on Mendenhall’s stoop. Although Horan was carrying a gun, he said he had felt threatened by Mendenhall and wanted to press charges.
“Rather than asking follow-up or clarifying questions,” Mendenhall’s brief says, “the officers went to Mr. Mendenhall’s townhouse and arrested him as soon as he
opened the door, securing him in handcuffs and taking him to a squad car across the street.” The officers called Rocco-McKeel, telling him what Horan had said. Without talking to Me
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