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State v. Boyea12/1/2000
gun on sight. Even assuming the officer had some basis for relying on the informant, Justice Marshall argued that Terry required the information demonstrate that the suspect is armed and dangerous. As he observed: "The fact remains that Connecticut specifically authorizes persons to carry guns so long as they have a permit. Thus, there was no reason for the officer to infer from anything that the informant said that the respondent was dangerous." Id. at 159-60. Of the majority's decision, he wrote, "the Fourth Amendment, which was included in the Bill of Rights to prevent the kind of arbitrary and oppressive police action involved herein, is dealt a serious blow." Id. at 162.
The case before us is similar in one respect to Adams - we do not know the informant's name. It is also distinguishable. In Adams, the informer would have required inside information to know that the suspect was carrying a gun without a permit or had narcotics on his person. Yet, as Justice Marshall noted, no such inside information was established in the record. This did not, however, give the Court pause. The case before us is stronger. While the record did not disclose exactly how the informant came into the information that was relayed to the officer concerning defendant's erratic driving, the observation could easily and accurately have been made by anyone driving on the same highway. One did not require access to inside information or knowledge of the suspect's prior activities or personal proclivities to observe such public criminal behavior. Further, there can be no concern here, as was raised by the dissenting Justices in Adams, that the officer might have fabricated the anonymous tip. The evidence that he received the tip by way of a "be-on- the-lookout" (BOL) from the State Police Dispatcher was uncontested.
Thus, the Court's language and holding in Adams apply as well to the case at bar: "A brief stop of a suspicious individual, in order to determine his identity or to maintain the status quo momentarily while obtaining more information, may be most reasonable in light of the facts known to the officer at the time." Id. at 146.
The next case of significance is Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325 (1990), which involved an anonymous telephone tip that defendant, White, would be leaving a particular apartment at a particular time in a particular vehicle, that she would be going to a particular motel and that she carrying an attaché case that contained cocaine. Police observed White leave the apartment complex, albeit from a different apartment, enter the described vehicle and drive in the direction indicated in the tip. She was not carrying an attaché case. Police stopped White and conducted a consensual search of her car, which revealed marijuana. During the station house processing of White, cocaine was found in her purse.
The Court began its analysis by noting that while it had abandoned the traditional two-pronged test of an anonymous tip in the probable-cause context in favor of a "totality of the circumstances" approach, id. at 328 (citing Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 238 (1983)), the same factors remained relevant in determining the value of an informant's report: the informant's veracity and reliability, and the basis of the informant's knowledge, id. (citing Gates, 462 U.S. at 230). The Court then held that these factors were also relevant in the reasonable-suspicion context, "although allowance must be made in applying them for the lesser showing required to meet that standard." Id. at 328-29. In this regard, the Court cited its recent pronouncement in United States v. Sokolow: "The officer [making a Terry stop] . . . must be able to articulate something more than an inchoate and u
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