The State of Texas v. Manuel Rios

In The
Court of Appeals
Seventh District of Texas at Amarillo

No. 07-24-00366-CR

THE STATE OF TEXAS, APPELLANT

V.

MANUEL RIOS, APPELLEE

On Appeal from the 364th District Court
Lubbock County, Texas
Trial Court No. DC-2024-CR-1802, Honorable William R. Eichman II, Presiding

December 9, 2025
MEMORANDUM OPINION
Before QUINN, C.J., and DOSS and YARBROUGH, JJ.

We deny Appellee Manuel Rios’s motion for rehearing, withdraw our opinion

issued on July 17, 2025, and substitute the following opinion of the Court.

This case tests whether Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 38.23(b)’s good

faith exception applies when a search warrant affidavit was sworn before an official

authorized to administer oaths—but not the specific official required by statute. The State

of Texas appeals from the trial court’s order suppressing evidence pursuant to Appellee
Manuel Rios’s motion. By a single issue, the State argues that although the affidavit for

a search warrant did not strictly comply with Code of Criminal Procedure Article

18.0215(c), the officers acted in good faith. We agree with the State, and reverse and

remand.

BACKGROUND

The pertinent facts are straightforward. A grand jury indicted Rios on six counts of

sexual assault1 and one count of attempted sexual assault. Billy Koontz, a certified peace

officer and investigator with the Lubbock County District Attorney’s Office, completed an

affidavit seeking a search warrant for Rios’s cell phone. Chief Investigator Brent Rose,

another certified peace officer and Koontz’s supervisor, administered the oath to Koontz

for the affidavit. Koontz then emailed his signed affidavit and an unsigned warrant to

District Judge Les Hatch, who found probable cause existed and signed the warrant.

None of the three men—Judge Hatch, Koontz, or Rose—knew that Texas Code of

Criminal Procedure Article 18.0215(c) required the application be “sworn to or affirmed

before the judge.”

Rios moved to suppress evidence recovered from the cell phone on multiple

grounds. The trial court found probable cause existed but agreed with Rios that because

Koontz did not swear the affidavit before a judge as required by Article 18.0215(c), the

failure “amounted to no oath at all.”

1 See TEX. PENAL CODE § 22.011(a).

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ANALYSIS

Legal Framework

Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 18.01(b) establishes foundational

requirements for search warrants:

No search warrant shall issue for any purpose in this state unless sufficient
facts are first presented to satisfy the issuing magistrate that probable cause
does in fact exist for its issuance. A sworn affidavit setting forth substantial
facts establishing probable cause shall be filed in every instance in which a
search warrant is requested.

TEX. CODE CRIM. PROC. art. 18.01(a), (b).

Under the general rule, various officials may administer the required oath, including

peace officers. See TEX. GOV’T CODE § 602.002(18); see also Ashcraft v. State, No. 03-

12-00660-CR, 2013 Tex. App. LEXIS 10402, at *16 (Tex. App.—Austin Aug. 20, 2013,

no pet.) (mem. op., not designated for publication). The purpose of requiring an oath is

to call upon the affiant’s sense of moral duty to tell the truth and to instill a sense of

seriousness and responsibility. Smith v. State, 207 S.W.3d 787, 790 (Tex. Crim. App.

2006).

Article 18.0215, however, establishes heightened requirements for cellular

telephone searches. Article 18.0215(c) mandates that cell phone warrant applications

“must be written and signed and sworn to or affirmed before the judge.” TEX. CODE CRIM

PROC. art. 18.0215(c). This provision reflects the legislature’s recognition of the unique

privacy interests implicated by cellular telephone searches.

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The Good Faith Exception

Under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, a trial court must exclude evidence

obtained in violation of the Constitution or laws of Texas or the United States unless the

“evidence was obtained by a law enforcement officer acting in objective good faith

reliance upon a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate based on probable cause.” Id. art.

38.23(a), (b). The State bears the burden of proving the exception’s applicability.

Wheeler v. State, 616 S.W.3d 858, 866 (Tex. Crim. App. 2021). The good faith exception

applies when the prior law enforcement conduct was “close enough to the line of validity

that an objectively reasonable officer preparing the affidavit or executing the warrant

would believe that the information supporting the warrant was not tainted by

unconstitutional conduct.” McClintock v. State, 541 S.W.3d 63, 73 (Tex. Crim. App.

2017).

In Wheeler, the Court of Criminal Appeals addressed whether the good faith

exception applied when officers submitted a completely unsworn affidavit for a blood

search warrant. 616 S.W.3d at 866. The court held the good faith exception did not apply

because submitting an unsworn affidavit violated both long-standing federal constitutional

requirements and state statutory mandates that warrants may only issue when probable-

cause facts are sworn under oath. Id.

Critically, the Court emphasized that the defect in Wheeler was not “a mere

procedural irregularity with respect to how the affidavit was sworn” but rather that the

affidavit “was not sworn at all.” Id. at 867. The court concluded that “[t]he complete

absence of this indispensable constitutional and statutory requirement is nowhere close

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to the line of valid law enforcement conduct that would bring this situation within the ambit

of the good-faith exception.” Id.

We find Wheeler distinguishable. Although the trial court concluded Koontz’s

affidavit was legally unsworn, it was in fact made under oath before an official generally

authorized to administer oaths. See TEX. GOV’T CODE § 602.002(18); Smith, 207 S.W.3d

at 790. Investigator Koontz did not simply sign a paper and submit it; he took an oath,

swore to the truthfulness of the facts, and subjected himself to perjury prosecution for any

knowingly false statements. The fact that the incorrect official administered the otherwise

valid oath demonstrates this irregularity as procedural rather than foundationally deficient.

Nothing in Wheeler or other authority has held that an affidavit sworn under oath to a

duly-authorized officer is a nullity merely because the statute requires a different official

to administer the oath.

The Court of Criminal Appeals has applied the good faith exception where officers

rely on warrants with technical defects that do not undermine the warrant’s constitutional

foundation. In State v. Arellano, the court held that a defect on a warrant that failed to

meet Article 18.04(5)’s requirements (requiring a legible signature) did not preclude the

good faith exception. 600 S.W.3d 53, 60–61 (Tex. Crim. App. 2020). The court

emphasized that “evidence obtained pursuant to such a defective warrant should not be

rendered inadmissible, so long as the statutory requirements of Article 38.23(b) are

satisfied . . . .” Id.

Similarly, in Dunn v. State, a magistrate’s missing signature on an arrest warrant

was held to be a defect covered by the good faith exception. 951 S.W.2d 478, 479 (Tex.

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Crim. App. 1997). The Court held that despite the statutory violation, the record reflected

“the magistrate found probable cause to issue the warrant, signed the accompanying

warrants, and intended but inadvertently failed to sign appellant’s arrest warrant.” Id.

Contrary to what Rios suggests, the statutory good faith exception is not limited to

defects on the face of the warrant itself. It can encompass defects in the oath supporting

the warrant provided that the constitutional foundation lies intact and the officer’s reliance

is objectively reasonable. Consistent with that focus, at least one court has applied the

exception where the defect lay in how the underlying complaint or affidavit was sworn

rather than in the warrant form itself. See Flores v. State, 367 S.W.3d 697, 702–03 (Tex.

App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 2012, pet. ref’d), (recognizing good faith exception when

police officer swore complaint for an arrest warrant before an assistant district attorney

rather than “before the magistrate” as required under Article 15.03(a)(2) when the officer

“followed standard procedure in attesting to his complaint and obtaining the warrant” and

the warrant indicated complaint was made under oath.).

Our holding is narrow. We do not hold that Article 18.0215(c)’s judge-specific oath

requirement is optional or that its violation is trivial. Rather, we hold that this judge-

specific requirement, important as it is, does not transform a constitutionally-sworn

affidavit into the equivalent of no oath at all, and it does not categorically preclude

application of Article 38.23(b) where the statute’s four elements—warrant, neutral

magistrate, probable cause, and objective good faith reliance—are otherwise satisfied.

The Court of Criminal Appeals has “repeatedly reminded reviewing courts that they

should not invalidate the warrant by interpreting the affidavit in a hypertechnical, rather

than a commonsense, manner.” Rodriguez v. State, 232 S.W.3d 55, 59 (Tex. Crim. App.
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2007). This case involves a technical procedural violation applied to an otherwise valid

warrant supported by probable cause, not the complete absence of an oath that rendered

the Wheeler affidavit constitutionally deficient.

Objective Reasonableness

On rehearing, Rios argues that Article 18.0215(c)’s requirement reflects the

Legislature’s recognition of the unique privacy interests in cell phones, as discussed in

Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014). Riley speaks to when a warrant is required;

Article 18.0215(c) specifies how the warrant process should proceed for this type of

evidence.

When an officer actually takes an oath before a qualified official, presents that

sworn affidavit to a neutral judge, and obtains a warrant the trial court finds supported by

probable cause, Article 38.23(b) permits reliance on that warrant notwithstanding a

violation of Article 18.0215(c)’s requirement that the oath be administered “before the

judge.”

After the affidavit was sworn before Rose, Koontz submitted it to Judge Hatch.

Judge Hatch reviewed the sworn affidavit, found probable cause, and signed the warrant.

Officers then received the judge-signed warrant and executed the search in reliance on

that warrant. The undisputed testimony shows officers believed they were authorized to

search the cell phone based on Judge Hatch’s signed warrant. The record shows: (1) a

warrant, (2) issued by a neutral magistrate, (3) based on probable cause, and

(4) objectively reasonable reliance by officers who followed standard procedures in

swearing out and executing that warrant. This is precisely the scenario Article 38.23(b)

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addresses: officers acting “in objective good faith reliance upon a warrant issued by a

neutral magistrate based on probable cause.”

Although the legislature may have had important reasons for requiring cell phone

warrant affidavits to be sworn before a judge, this procedural requirement is not so

fundamental that it precludes application of the good faith exception. Oaths for search

warrant affidavits are regularly administered by non-judge officials in the vast majority of

cases, placing Koontz’s conduct “close enough to the line of validity” to meet the

“objectively reasonable officer” standard. Wheeler, 616 S.W.3d at 866.

We sustain the State’s sole issue.

CONCLUSION

We reverse the trial court’s order suppressing evidence obtained pursuant to the

search warrant for Rios’s cell phone, and remand for further proceedings not inconsistent

with this opinion.

Lawrence M. Doss
Justice

Do not publish.

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