Opinion ID: 2402568
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Cases Against Bethea

Text: It is the contention of this appellant that his arrest was illegal for want of probable cause and that the subsequently made confessions were therefore inadmissible in evidence. The claim is that the anonymous telephone call to the police that this appellant was the man who got away after the abortive attempt to rob Howard's Liquor Store a second time and the giving of his whereabouts was insufficient probable cause to warrant his arrest. But this overlooks the fact that when the police, who had previously received a general description of the other masked participant and the clothing he was wearing, went to the address given and knocked on the front door, a man with a black scarf on top of his head and otherwise fitting the description of the person they were looking for came to the door. That man turned out to be Bethea. He accompanied his arrestors to the police station and subsequently admitted his participation in the robberies. The trial court found that under all the circumstances the police had probable cause to believe that Bethea had been involved in the attempted robbery and that his arrest was therefore legal. We agree. See Young v. State, supra . In holding the arrest to be lawful we are not unmindful of the recent decision of the Supreme Court in Beck v. Ohio, 379 U.S. 89 (1964), holding that information received from an informer was not in that case sufficient probable cause for arrest. That case, however, is clearly distinguishable from this. There, the police officer had not testified with specificity as to what the informer had actually said and why he thought the information was credible. Here, the police officer, in addition to fully disclosing what the anonymous caller had said, further testified that on such information and his own subsequent observations he made the arrest. Having held the arrest to have been lawful, the only remaining question is whether or not the confessions were voluntarily made, and as to this, there was no claim that they were not. See p. 158 of this opinion.