Convicted of egging prosecutor's cars, man gets a reprieve from state's top court
It all began with a criminal case accusing an Ohio man of selling alcohol to minors.
Within a few months, a prosecutor’s’ vehicles were egged and damaged.
An informant provided texts to police in Twinsburg, Ohio, where Nicholas Castagnola lived, in which the young man had gloated about his role in the egging. Subsequently, the informant wore a wire and a recorded conversation provided more details, including a comment by Castagnola that he had used court records to look up the prosecutor’s address online, reports the Northeast Ohio Media Group.
Police got a search warrant, and went through Castagnola’s home and his home computers. On them, they found not only had he used it to search for court information but material suggestive of child pornography. After obtaining a second search warrant, they searched the computer again. In the end, Castagnola was convicted not only of retaliating against the prosecutor, vandalism and related charges but pandering sexually oriented material involving a minor. He got 30 months behind bars and was classified a sex offender.
But on Tuesday, the Ohio Supreme Court, by a 4-3 ruling, suppressed the evidence obtained under both search warrants. The majority said the initial search warrant lacked both an adequate basis for the search and failed to specify what was being sought, as required by the Fourth Amendment. The second search warrant was invalid because it was based on evidence obtained under the first one, the news article explains.
“The affidavit was so lacking in indicia of probable cause and the warrant was so facially deficient in failing to particularize the items to be searched for on Castagnola’s computer that the detective could not have relied on it in objective good faith,” the majority said in the court’s written opinion (PDF).
The problem was, although Castagnola said he searched court records for the prosecutor’s address, it wasn’t clear what equipment he had used to do so, the court said:
“The detective did not state in the search-warrant affidavit the Internet-access capability or other capabilities of Castagnola’s cell phone. Nor did the search-warrant affidavit provide information, beyond the ‘online’ inference, to indicate that Castagnola had conducted an online search for [the prosecutor’s] address or that a computer that was used to conduct such a search was located in Castagnola’s residence.”
The dissenters said that “under the totality of the circumstances, the magistrate had a substantial basis for issuing the search warrant.”
Castagnola can still be retried, but prosecutors can’t use any of the evidence obtained through the use of the search warrants.
