Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
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State v. Worley, ___ N.C. App. ___, 803 S.E.2d 412 (Jul. 18, 2017)
The trial court properly denied the defendant’s motion to suppress evidence seized during the executions of warrants to search his rental cabin and truck for stolen goods connected to a breaking and entering of a horse trailer. The defendant argued that the search warrant affidavit establish no nexus between the cabin and the criminal activity. The court found however “that under the totality of the circumstances, the accumulation of reasonable inferences drawn from information contained within the affidavit sufficiently linked the criminal activity to defendant’s cabin.” Among other things, the affidavit established that when one of the property owners hired the defendant to work at their farm, several tools and pieces of equipment went missing and were never recovered; immediately before the defendant moved out of state, someone broke into their daughter’s car and stole property; the defendant rented a cabin close to their property around the same time as the reported breaking and entering and larceny; and the defendant had prior convictions for first-degree burglary and felony larceny. Based on this and other evidence discussed in detail in the court’s opinion, the affidavit established a sufficient nexus between the criminal activity and the defendant’s cabin.