Background
Shaun Lance was riding in the backseat of a rideshare vehicle when police stopped it. After learning that Lance had an outstanding narcotics warrant, an officer arrested him and searched the vehicle. Police found two pill bottles in the seatback pocket directly in front of Lance: a labeled prescription bottle belonging to him and an unlabeled bottle containing bags of green and white pills.
The officer entered the pills’ imprinted letters and numbers into Drugs.com and identified the green pills as alprazolam and the white pills as hydrocodone. Over Lance’s hearsay objection, the district court admitted the officer’s testimony about those identifications and bound Lance over on two controlled-substance charges. The circuit court denied Lance’s motion to quash the bindover, and the Court of Appeals granted leave to appeal.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals held that the officer’s testimony about the Drugs.com identifications was inadmissible hearsay. The prosecution failed to establish the foundation required by Michigan Rule of Evidence 803(17), which covers compilations generally relied upon by the public or people in particular occupations. Its unsupported assertion that the website was relied upon by the public, law enforcement, and pharmacists was not evidence and did not satisfy its burden.
The court also rejected the prosecution’s alternative theories. A website search was not equivalent to a properly performed drug-analysis field test under MCL 766.11b, and the residual hearsay exception did not apply because an actual drug analysis would have provided more probative and reliable evidence. Without the Drugs.com testimony, no admissible evidence identified the pills as controlled substances. The district court therefore abused its discretion by binding Lance over, and the circuit court erred by denying his motion to quash. The Court of Appeals reversed.
Key Takeaways
- The rules of evidence apply at a Michigan preliminary examination despite the proceeding’s lower probable-cause standard.
- A party invoking the exception for generally relied-upon compilations must present evidence establishing the source’s reliability and general use; attorney argument alone is insufficient.
- An officer’s identification of pills through a website is not a properly performed drug-analysis field test, and the availability of actual drug testing defeated reliance on the residual hearsay exception.
Why It Matters
The decision separates evidentiary admissibility from the prosecution’s comparatively low burden of proof at a preliminary examination. A lower standard affects the weight needed to establish probable cause, but it does not relax the threshold rules governing whether evidence may be considered.
For controlled-substance prosecutions, the opinion underscores the risk of relying solely on an online pill-identification database without laying a proper evidentiary foundation or obtaining laboratory or qualifying field-test results.