State of Tennessee v. Delawrence Williams

This is a Rule 9, Tennessee Rules of Appellate Procedure, interlocutory appeal of the trial court’s denial of the defendant’s motion to suppress drug evidence seized from his home during a search executed pursuant to a warrant. The defendant, Delawrence Williams, is charged with possession of more than .5 grams of cocaine with the intent to sell or deliver based on the drug evidence recovered from his home and with aggravated assault based on a domestic violence episode involving his girlfriend that preceded the issuance of the search warrant. At the suppression hearing, he argued that the officer’s affidavit in support of the warrant failed to establish probable cause because it did not contain sufficient facts to show that the defendant’s girlfriend, who was the source for the officer’s knowledge, satisfied the two-pronged test, as set forth in State v. Jacumin, 778 S.W.2d 430 (Tenn. 1989), for information supplied by a criminal informant. The trial court denied the motion, finding that the affidavit sufficiently demonstrated the basis for the informant’s knowledge and the reliability of her information. Following our review, we affirm the order of the trial court denying the motion to suppress.