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State v. Boyea12/1/2000
surveillance and divulgement that intrusion made possible." Id. at 1546. The unmistakable conclusion from the historical record is that Americans wanted all searches and all seizures to be based on reliable information, rather than on bald accusations by persons of unknown character.
We must therefore follow the Supreme Court's guidance and implement the Amendment by requiring the police to exercise judgment about the reliability and truthfulness of anonymous accusations of illegal conduct. As Justice Dooley has observed, we must be "concerned about giving a central place to anonymous accusations in law enforcement because we cannot know the motive of the accuser or judge the accuser's reliability." Lamb, 168 Vt. at 203, 720 A.2d at 1107 (Dooley, J., dissenting). Justices Stevens, Brennan, and Marshall offered a similar caution: "Anybody with enough knowledge about a given person to make her the target of a prank, or to harbor a grudge against her, will certainly be able to formulate a tip about her like the one predicting Vanessa White's excursion." White, 496 U.S. at 333 (Stevens, J., dissenting, joined by Brennan and Marshall, JJ.). Today's majority would not even require that the accuser know anything about Vicki Boyea-they would be satisfied if someone saw her car getting on the Interstate because that person can then "predict" that her car will continue to be on the Interstate. And this insider "prediction" justifies stopping any car because the driver might be driving drunk.
The majority is eloquent about the danger of drunk driving , but public safety is not a novel concern of this century. The Framers of the Amendment lived under a system of unbridled search and seizure allegedly justified by dozens of "dangers" that evolved in the British common law and statute books. Moreover, their dangers were not so very different from ours. Searches and seizures were repeatedly used to control and confiscate weapons, from the Tudor period right through the American Revolution. See, e.g., Cuddihy, supra, at 99, 185, 357, 380, 439, 611, 1150. Nor is alcohol a new problem. Both sides of the Atlantic experienced searches and seizures directed at controlling alcohol consumption, see id. at 376, 381, 390, 488, as well as at distilleries and breweries, see id. at 386, 387, 390. Drinking was not merely a moral crime but a compelling danger to the public for the American colonists. In the southern colonies, general searches were used, among other purposes, to "stop riotous drinking." Id. at 438. Finally, smuggling and trading with the enemy, which we perhaps do not think of as modern dangers, were among the most compelling threats to governmental authority in the century surrounding the adoption of the Amendment. Massachusetts was described in 1676 as a "'deformed anarchy,' in which annual violations of the Navigation Acts exceeded a hundred thousand pounds," id. at 696, and by 1776, "epidemic smuggling had eviscerated" the Massachusetts customs authority, see id. at 1051. In the newly-federated United States, trading with the enemy in wartime "imperiled the very survival of the state" and yet general warrants were not permitted as an instrument to control the illegal trading. Id. at 1279.
It was against this backdrop that the Fourth Amendment was drafted and adopted. It was in a context full of dangers that had for centuries justified a wide variety of intrusive searches and seizures. The Amendment deliberately rejected the idea that any claim to be acting for public safety necessarily justified promiscuous search and seizure powers. The Constitution protects privacy against the fears and anxieties of the moment; it forces the state to act cautiously, even slowly, despite the risks entailed. As P
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