A Pulaski County circuit judge is considering throwing out evidence seized from the home and person of a Little Rock murder suspect due to a flawed search warrant. Judge Karen Whatley said she'll give prosecutors and defense attorneys time to file written arguments to try to change her mind.
"I have numerous problems with this warrant," Whatley told the lawyers on Thursday. "It's important to get every search warrant right."
Yahchanan Anthony Makavelli, 53, is charged with second-degree murder, accused of fatally stabbing 33-year-old Nicholas Deandre Hampton of Pine Bluff during an April 2022 disturbance on South Schiller Street where witnesses said Hampton had been threatening his girlfriend with an assault rifle.
Makavelli was arrested about five hours later largely on the word of Hampton's 10-year-old niece who said she saw a man she knew as "13" and a neighbor of her grandmother's stabbing Hampton. She was able to identify Makavelli as the man she saw. He denied being the assailant. He is set to stand trial next month.
Makavelli's lawyer, Leslie Borgognoni, said the warrant investigator Oscar Gomez used to search Makavelli's house is too flawed to be legal and that all of the evidence collected should be suppressed.
Those errors include the wrong address of the house that was searched; the warrant approves a vehicle search, not a house search; and the date is wrong.
DNA evidence testing has not been completed but taken from Makavelli's home were a stainless steel knife and sheath, a .22-caliber rifle, a .22 revolver and ammunition. The discovery of the weapons resulted in a separate charge for Makavelli of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
After hearing Gomez testify, Whatley said she found no sign of deliberate police misconduct. Whatley said the warrant does not show what evidence police had compiled to justify the house search, further noting that it lists the wrong address eight times.
"When I look at the face of this warrant, it is deficient," she said.
Deputy prosecutor Justin Brown argued that since the police mistakes were not malicious, the evidence should not be suppressed. Courts are supposed to throw out evidence to punish misconduct when police deliberately act improperly, Brown told the judge. But there's no proof investigators deliberately broke the law to collect the evidence, he said.
Brown said the standard for reviewing warrants, a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling U.S. v. Leon, makes exceptions to preserve evidence seized by police when the officers acting on good faith with a legitimately issued warrant, even if that warrant is later found to be defective.