Pubdate: Sun, 27 Apr 2014
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248

EVERY DRIVER A SUSPECT

Given the danger posed by drunk or reckless drivers, police should 
follow up on information - even information from an anonymous source 
- - that a vehicle might be careening down a street or threatening 
other motorists and pedestrians. If they confirm that is the case, 
they should stop the vehicle.

But that isn't what happened in a California case decided by the 
Supreme Court last week. The court's ruling makes it too easy for 
police to stop motorists on the basis of an anonymous tip.

In 2008, a 911 dispatch team in Mendocino County received a report 
that a pickup truck had forced another vehicle off the road, giving 
rise to a concern that the driver might be drunk. California Highway 
Patrol officers followed the truck for five miles but observed no 
sign of drunken or erratic driving. They pulled the car over anyway 
and, after smelling marijuana, searched the vehicle and found 30 
pounds of the drug.

The occupants of the truck argued that the police lacked the 
"reasonable suspicion" required for a traffic stop. But, writing for 
the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas concluded that the stop was 
reasonable because the tip was reliable given the "totality of 
circumstances," including the fact that the caller identified the 
truck and its license plate.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justices 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said that the 
majority had undermined precedents holding that anonymous tips must 
be corroborated before police can act on them. Scalia warned that 
motorists could now be stopped (and searched) "based upon a phone 
tip, true or false, of a single instance of careless driving."

That's not the only problem. In a 1990 case in which the court upheld 
a stop based partly on an anonymous tip, Justice John Paul Stevens 
worried that a police officer who stopped a suspect might falsely 
testify that he was acting on anonymous information. Fabrication will 
be an even greater temptation after last week's decision.

We hope Scalia proves to be an alarmist and that lower courts will 
insist that anonymous tips be extremely detailed and convincing 
before accepting them as justification for traffic stops that lead to 
searches and criminal charges. But this case should have gone the other way.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom