Police received information from a reliable informant that Garcia had a lot of meth in his trailer. A more-than-personal-use amount. A few days later, the investigating agent obtained a search warrant based on this information. The affidavit for the warrant included an accurate description of Garcia's trailer, a photograph of Garcia's trailer, and the incorrect address for Garcia's trailer. A warrant was granted, commanding the police to search the trailer "forthwith."
A different cop supervised the search of Garcia's trailer, nine days after the issuance of the warrant. Prior to conducting the search, he noticed that the address on the warrant was actually the address for a different building. He assumed that Garcia's trailer and the other building must share an address, and he searched Garcia's trailer (he knew which one to search because of the description, the photograph, and because the investigator had pointed it out to him). They found a lot of meth, which Garcia was trying to put into the garbage disposal.
In court, Garcia moved to suppress the meth. He argued that the search warrant was stale and therefore invalid, and that the search warrant listed the wrong address and was therefore invalid. The trial court denied his motion, and he appealed.
In its decision, the Tenth Circuit explains the idea behind staleness in search warrants: a search warrant is only valid for as long as the information in the affidavit supports probable cause to believe that whatever you're looking for will be found when the search is conducted. So timing can be a sensitive issue... if you're searching for something that can easily be removed from wherever it's hidden, then you'd have to either move pretty quickly or have a good reason to believe that it's not being moved. But timing isn't always critical. In cases where the affidavit indicates ongoing criminal activity (such as continuous drug trafficking from a residence), time is less critical because it's expected that due to the ongoing nature of the crime there will still be evidence to be found.
In addition to the above requirements, there are limits on how long a search warrant is valid written into the rules of evidence (for the feds it used to be ten days, but now it's fourteen. Same goes for Colorado).
So Garcia argued that the information in the warrant was stale (both because the cops waited three days to get a warrant, and because they waited nine to serve it). The Court held that due to the continuous nature of drug trafficking the warrant was not stale. Garcia also argued that the word "forthwith" in the search warrant was a special command from the judge to get on it right away. The Court recognized that "forthwith" is just anachronistic standard language on the form that New Mexico uses for search warrants, and therefore it was not a special command, and that even if it had been it wasn't important.
That leaves the whole "wrong address" issue. There's no getting around that the affidavit lists the wrong address, but it also contains a pretty detailed description (and picture) of the right address. The test that the court uses to determine whether a warrant particularly describes the place to be searched is whether the description would allow an officer to identify the correct place with reasonable effort, and whether or not it's reasonably likely that the wrong place will be searched. In this case, even though there was an incorrect address, there was plenty of correct information which narrowed the search down to the right place. So the warrant was good enough for government work.
And that means that the evidence was admissible, and Garcia's conviction was upheld.
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