search-and-seizure fourth-amendment
If police don&#39;t know which apartment has criminal evidence, can they search all of them?
<p>Suppose the police have probable cause that there is evidence of a crime in an apartment that is part of a complex, but they can't figure out which apartment it is. Can they search all of them with a warrant?</p>

<p>If the police can get a warrant from a judge confirming that they have probable cause, they could, and that finding would probably be confirmed in a subsequent suppression hearing alleging that the warrant was issued without probable cause.</p>

<p>But, it would be unlikely that a judge would issue a warrant that covered multiple apartments if there was not probable cause to indicate that evidence of the crime was in a particular apartment.</p>

<p>I could imagine a situation where a judge might do so (e.g. the evidence was strapped onto a rat that had the ability to move from apartment to apartment in a wing of four adjacent apartments in the same wing of the building through the crawl space in the ceiling), but in any reasonably normal fact pattern, a judge would be unlikely to grant a warrant in a situation where probable cause had not narrowed down the particular apartment where the evidence was believed to be located due to insufficient investigation by the police.</p>
