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TN: Failure to immediate serve DNA search warrant on prison inmate not fatal to search

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

In this capital case, Pennsylvania police received word in 1994 that defendant in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was a suspect in a 1988 Tennessee murder. Tennessee officers went there with a Kansas search warrant for defendant’s DNA, which they did not serve on him at the time as required by state rule 41, but they mailed him a copy. After getting his DNA, defendant confessed to the muder. In 1989, the state court of appeals held in an unpublished opinion (not in S.W.2d, that is) that failure to immediately serve a search warrant on an incarcerated suspect was not fatal to the search, and that case is followed. State v. Henretta, 2010 Tenn. LEXIS 888 (September 30, 2010)* (since the search warrant was issued and served in Kansas, why was not Kansas law applied?)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on October 05, 2010 (boomark / email).