The end of last week saw the issuance of one Supreme Court ruling and two published Appellate Division decisions. Two of those were in criminal appeals. The third involved the exclusion of an expert witness in a medical malpractice case.
State v. Caniero, ___ N.J. ___ (2025). This opinion by Justice Fasciale in a murder and arson case involved the exigent circumstances exception to the requirement of a search warrant. As Justice Fasciale phrased it, the particular issue was “whether law enforcement officers had an objectively reasonable basis to believe that securing a search warrant was impracticable because immediate action was necessary to prevent the destruction of evidence located in a garage, not itself on fire, but attached to a house that remained ablaze.”
The evidence in question was a security camera digital video recorder (“DVR”) located in the home’s garage. Justice Fasciale summarized the State’s position as follows. “The State alleges that defendant murdered his brother, his brother’s wife, and their two children, and then set their house ablaze to cover up his involvement in those crimes. The State further contends that, after the murders at his brother’s home, defendant set his own house on fire with his wife and children asleep inside as a ruse to suggest that criminals targeted both families. The State asserts that the DVR, the subject of this interlocutory appeal, showed defendant disconnecting the security camera system prior to starting the fire in his house.”
The Law Division granted a motion to suppress. The Appellate Division affirmed. On further review, however, the Supreme Court reversed.
Justice Fasciale emphasized that the parameters of the exigent circumstances exception cannot be defined with precision but is highly fact-sensitive. The Court invoked the six non-exhaustive factors of State v. Manning, 240 N.J. 308 (2020), on which the lower courts had also relied. Those factors are “(1) the seriousness of the crime under investigation, (2) the urgency of the situation faced by the officers, (3) the time it would have taken to secure a warrant, (4) the threat that evidence would be destroyed or lost or people would be endangered unless immediate action was taken, (5) information that the suspect was armed and posed an imminent danger, and (6) the strength or weakness of the probable cause relating to the item to be searched or seized.” Applying de novo review, the Court disagreed with the lower courts and found that those factors supported an exigent circumstances search.
The parties did not dispute the seriousness of the charge of second-degree aggravated arson, which carries a presumption of incarceration upon conviction. The first Manning factor thus favored the State.
The Court disagreed with the courts below as to the second, “urgency of the situation” issue. While, as the trial court had found, the fire in the garage had been extinguished for 30 minutes when the search began, the rest of the house was still “engulfed in flames,” according to the testimony. “Fire suppression activities involving water, chemical fire extinguishers, and power saws were ongoing and could have damaged the sensitive digital evidence in the DVR. The garage was attached to the residence, which remained burning when police seized the DVR.” In fact, the DVR was located on a wall directly attached to the burning house. The second Manning factor thus favored the State as well.
So did the third and fourth factors. It would likely have taken hours to get a warrant, and it was objectively reasonable for the police to fear the loss of key evidence, for reasons already stated and because the fire was near the home’s gas meter, which could have further engulfed the house.
The fifth factor favored defendant, as he had not yet been identified as a suspect. But the sixth Manning factor also supported the State. “Officers at the scene found a burnt plastic gas can in the driveway that appeared to have been taken from another location on defendant’s property. Police also found wet boot prints near the gas can storage area, burn marks on the hood of the car parked outside the garage door, and the smell of gasoline near the garage. Officers identified multiple ignition points -- indicative of arson.” Accordingly, the Court reversed and remanded for further proceedings.
State v. Bryant, ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2025). Judge Gilson wrote the lengthy opinion in this case. Though well worth reading in full, the first section of the opinion, reprinted below, well summarizes the essence.
“Two men invaded a home, robbed a family, and one of the men sexually assaulted a woman who lived at the home. Through investigations, which included warrants to obtain data from cell towers around the home, law enforcement personnel identified defendants James Hunter, Phillip Bryant, and Wayne Smith as suspects. Thereafter, a grand jury indicted defendants for twenty-four crimes, including multiple counts of first-degree robbery, N.J.S.A.2C:15-1(a), and two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault against Hunter, N.J.S.A. 2C:14-2(a)(3) and (4).
Defendants Hunter and Bryant moved to suppress the evidence obtained from the four warrants arguing that ‘tower dump warrants’ are unconstitutional searches. We hold that governmental requests for data from cell towers are searches and require a warrant. We further hold that those warrants must be supported by probable cause and must be particularized in the information they seek. Four of the warrants issued in this matter were not particularized because they sought identifying information about thousands of cell phone users who were clearly not involved with the robbery or assault. Therefore, those warrants were unconstitutional under both the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article I, Paragraph 7 of the New Jersey Constitution.
Nevertheless, we also hold that the information identifying defendants would have inevitably been discovered through lawful means. Consequently, we affirm, on alternative grounds, the order denying defendants’ motion to suppress the evidence obtained from the warrants as they relate to defendants. In doing so, we set forth guidelines for determining when tower dump warrants are lawful and what the State must do with information that is clearly not relevant to the specific crimes that were the subject of the warrants.”
Weissman v. Li, ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2025). In this medical malpractice case, the Law Division barred plaintiff’s liability expert, a board -certified anesthesiologist and pain management specialist, on issues of medical causation. The court gave two reasons. First, as Judge Sabatino summarized it in his opinion for the Appellate Division in this case, “at his discovery deposition, the expert agreed with defense counsel’s question that he would ‘defer to a neurologist’ on whether the surgery caused plaintiff to experience symptoms of pain in his leg and foot. The court treated that deposition answer as a concession by the expert that he is unqualified to opine on the causation issues in this case.” Second, the Law Division barred the expert’s causation testimony because his expert report contained inadmissible net opinions. Without that expert, plaintiff could not defeat a subsequent defense motion for summary judgment.
The Appellate Division affirmed the exclusion of the expert on the net opinion ground only. In principle, the panel need not have gone further. But Judge Sabatino provided a detailed analysis of the “defer” issue, concisely explaining at the outset the reason for doing that and what the panel’s conclusion was:
“Upon considering the divergent outcomes in cases from other jurisdictions, we address the expert deference issue as a matter of first impression under New Jersey law. We decline to adopt a per se rule that would treat a testifying expert’s acknowledgment to ‘defer’ to another expert who has a different or overlapping specialty as a categorical admission that the testifying expert lacks the qualifications to render opinions about the subject. Instead, the context of the ‘deferral’ must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”
The careful explanation that followed was very useful to any party or counsel involved in a complex matter where multiple experts on the same side rely on or defer to each other. Though technically dicta, this opinion is likely to be quite influential, though not necessarily conclusive, going forward.
