Opinion ID: 3012383
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Terry v. Ohio Jurisprudence

Text: In 2000, the United States Supreme Court decided two cases in which the justification for a stop was in dispute: Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266 (2000), and Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000). Although the parties focus their discussion on J.L., the case whose facts are most closely analogous to our own, we find the analysis in both cases valuable in our assessment of what is necessary to justify a stop.
On October 13, 1995, an anonymous caller reported to the Miami-Dade Police that a young black male standing at a particular bus stop and wearing a plaid shirt was carrying a gun. 529 U.S. at 268. After an unspecified amount of time, two officers approached the bus stop and noticed three young men, one of whom wore a plaid shirt. None of the young men was behaving suspiciously; no weapons were evident; and none of the young men ran. Id. The police officers frisked all three young men and found a _________________________________________________________________ 3. On appeal, Nelson has raised three issues. The other two issues -- one a challenge to the prosecutor's alleged vouching, and the other a challenge under Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000), based on the District Court's failure to submit Nelson's recidivism to the jury -- we find to be without merit. The District Court found the vouching, which did not seek to divert the jury from the evidence or its assessment of it, not to constitute reversible error. We review the decision for abuse of discretion, and if we find error, we examine whether the error was of constitutional proportions; if not, we affirm if there is a high probability the error did not contribute to the conviction. But if the error does involve a violation of a constitutional right it must be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. United States v. Molina-Guevara, 96 F.3d 698, 703 (3d Cir. 1996). Applying that standard, we will not disturb the District Court's ruling. Regarding Apprendi, the use of prior convictions without a jury finding is explicitly excluded from the scope of Apprendi. See 530 U.S. at 490 (Other than the fact of a prior conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.). Only the Terry issue warrants extensive analysis. 5 gun on J.L. He was subsequently charged with carrying a concealed firearm without a license and possession of a firearm while under the age of 18. Id. at 269. In determining that the police were not justified in their stop of J.L., the Court noted several important factors: - the telephone call was from an unknown caller and an unknown location. - the officers had no other basis or observations to justify their actions. - there was no corroborating evidence to think the tipster had inside knowledge about the suspect and therefore to credit his assertion . . . . Id. at 270. In addressing Florida's arguments, the Court refuted assumptions and resolved controversies that had permeated decisions of the courts of appeals and district courts. The first of these was that an accurate description was sufficient to infer reliability. As the Court stated: An accurate description of a subject's readily observable location and appearance is of course reliable in this limited sense: It will help the police correctly identify the person whom the tipster means to accuse. Such a tip, however, does not show that the tipster has knowledge of concealed criminal activity. The reasonable suspicion here at issue requires that a tip be reliable in its assertion of illegality, not just in its tendency to identify a determinate person. Id. at 272. The Court also rejected the commonly-held perception that allegations of gun possession lessen the reliability that is otherwise required. The Court opined that the very rationale of requiring only reasonable suspicion, rather than probable cause, to warrant a Terry stop was precisely to accommodate the need for police to respond to dangerous situations posed by guns. While the Court acknowledged that some dangers might be great enough, or in some situations the expectation of privacy might be reduced enough, to justify a search without any indicia of 6 reliability (for instance if it was reported that a person was carrying a bomb), the Court emphasized that in all other instances, a stop is justified only if there is sufficient reliability to support a reasonable suspicion. Id. at 273-74.
Two months prior to J.L., the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Illinois v. Wardlow. There, officers were patrolling an area that had been subject to heavy drug trafficking. They observed a man holding a bag. When the man saw the officers, he fled. The Illinois Supreme Court had held that the combination of flight and a high crime area were insufficient to justify a Terry stop. The United States Supreme Court reversed. It noted that nervous, evasive behavior is a pertinent factor in determining reasonable suspicion. 528 U.S. at 124. And it held that in combination the flight and the high crime area justified the stop. But it also stressed that officers are not required to ignore the relevant characteristics of a location in determining whether the circumstances are sufficiently suspicious to warrant further investigation. Id. And it reiterated that the stop's being in a high crime area was among the relevant contextual considerations in a Terry analysis. Id.
The reasoning of both J.L. and Wardlow drew on principles established in several of the Court's earlier decisions. In United States v. Hensley, for example, the Court established that whether the officers making an investigatory stop were justified in their decision depends on whether the officer doing the broadcasting (or, in the specific facts upon which Hensley was predicated, the drawing up of a wanted poster) possessed a reasonable suspicion on the basis of articulable facts. 469 U.S. 221, 232-33 (1985). The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that a reasonable suspicion may be the result of any combination of one or several factors: specialized knowledge and investigative inferences (United States v. Cortez), personal observation of suspicious behavior (Terry v. Ohio), 7 information from sources that have proven to be reliable, and information from sources that -- while unknown to the police -- prove by the accuracy and intimacy of the information provided to be reliable at least as to the details contained within that tip (Alabama v. White). In United States v. Cortez the Court expanded on the standard: Courts have used a variety of terms to capture the elusive concept of what cause is sufficient to authorize police to stop a person. Terms like articulable reasons and founded suspicion are not self-defining; they fall short of providing clear guidance dispositive of the myriad factual situations that arise. But the essence of all that has been written is that the totality of the circumstances -- the whole picture -- must be taken into account. Based upon that whole picture the detaining officers must have a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity. 449 U.S. 411, 417-18 (1981). The Court stressed that, in performing the requisite calculus, the evaluation of the totality of the circumstances must give rise to a particularized suspicion, because [this] demand for specificity in the information upon which police action is predicated is the central teaching of this Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Id. at 418 (quoting Terry at 21, n.18). In Cortez, a case in which the Court upheld a police stop of a vehicle based on the officers' observations and knowledge of how aliens were being smuggled, the Court accorded great weight to the officers' knowledge of the area being observed as a crossing point for aliens, and on the pattern of operations they had discerned through their investigations. Id. at 419. The Supreme Court has just issued another opinion construing reasonable suspicion in the context of crossborder smuggling. See United States v. Arvizu , 534 U.S. ___; 122 S. Ct. 744. In Arvizu drugs, rather than aliens, were being smuggled. The Ninth Circuit found the stop to be illegal under Terry, characterizing each factor that contributed to the officer's decision to stop the van either as 8 carrying little or no weight in the reasonable-suspicion calculus or as inadequate to justify the stop. Id. at 750. Reversing, the Supreme Court emphasized that the particularized and objective basis for an officer's reasonable suspicion arises out of the totality of the circumstances. Id. at 750. The Court also counseled that officers' experience and specialized training may allow them to make inferences and deductions from information that might well elude an untrained person. Id . at 751 (quoting Cortez, 449 U.S. at 418.). In Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S. 143 (1972), the Court addressed whether tips could form the basis of reasonable suspicion, concluding that where the tip was itself reliable, it could itself be the basis of the reasonable suspicion, but where the reliability of the tip was unknown or in doubt, reasonable suspicion had to rest on more than just the tip. Informants' tips, like all other clues and evidence coming to a policeman on the scene, may vary greatly in their value and reliability. One simple rule will not cover every situation. Some tips, completely lacking in indicia of reliability, would either warrant no police response or require further investigation before a forcible stop of a suspect would be authorized. But in some situations -- for example, when the victim of a street crime seeks immediate police aid and gives a description of his assailant, or when a credible informant warns of a specific impending crime -- the subtleties of the hearsay rule should not thwart an appropriate police response. Id. at 147. The Court also accorded importance to the fact that the stop occurred in a high crime area and during the early morning hours justified officers' fear for their safety. Id. at 147-48. Also, [t]he Fourth Amendment does not require a policeman who lacks the precise level of information necessary for probable cause to arrest to simply shrug his shoulders and allow a crime to occur or a criminal to escape. Id. at 145. The Court examined the propriety of a magistrate's reliance on an anonymous tip to establish probable cause to issue a search warrant in Illinois v. Gates , 462 U.S. 213 9 (1983). The Illinois Supreme Court had utilized a two-prong test to determine that the tip could not establish probable cause, evaluating the veracity of the informant and the basis of the knowledge provided. Id. at 230 n.4. Because the author of the tip was unknown, the first (veracity) prong could not be established. The second basis of knowledge prong could not be established because the details provided were insufficient to infer how the writer knew of the defendant's activities. Id. at 229-30. While agreeing that it was important to evaluate an informant's veracity, reliability, and basis of knowledge, the Court rejected the rigid application of separate and independent requirements, stressing instead that probable cause could be established only by examining the totality of the circumstances. Id. at 230-31. The Court found that the DEA agents' knowledge of the pattern of drug run behavior, combined with the fact that the agents' investigation corroborated the details provided in the anonymous letter were sufficient to constitute probable cause. Id . at 243-44. The Court specifically disagreed with the Illinois Supreme Court's discounting of the corroborative details asinnocent activity, stating that innocent behavior frequently will provide the basis for a showing of probable cause and that [i]n making a determination of probable cause the relevant inquiry is not whether particular conduct is `innocent' or `guilty,' but the degree of suspicion that attaches to particular types of noncriminal acts. Id. at 245 n.13. The Supreme Court revisited the reliability of anonymous tips in Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325, 329 (1990), concluding there that an anonymous tip that provided virtually nothing from which one might conclude that [the caller] is either honest or his information reliable and that provided no information that independently provided a basis for suspecting criminal activity, was insufficient to support a Terry stop. The Court emphasized the value that knowing an informant contributes to assessing the reliability of a tip, concluding that where there is no basis for determining the reliability of a tip from the informant, the information contained in the tip cannot by itself be sufficient to provide probable cause or even reasonable suspicion to justify a Terry stop. Instead, police must investigate further to provide independent corroboration of 10 the tip in order to justify stopping the target of the tip. Id. at 329. Such independent corroboration is measured by both the quantity and quality of the totality of the circumstances. If, for example, a tip on its own carries few indicia of reliability, much corroborating information is necessary to demonstrate reasonable suspicion. Id. at 330. Thus, where the tip contains information that later investigation contradicts, or that is of such a general nature as to be easily obtained by any observer, there is no reasonable suspicion. In White, in contrast, even though the tip was wholly anonymous, the details provided in the tip were sufficiently particularized and accurate to reflect a special familiarity with the subject of the information. Id. at 332. There, the special familiarity was demonstrated by the accurate prediction of the defendant's future behavior. Id.
We recently had an opportunity to construe J.L . in United States v. Valentine, 232 F.3d 350 (3d Cir. 2000). Two officers had been patrolling a high crime area during the early morning hours when they were flagged down by a man who claimed he had just seen a man with a gun and described the man's attire and his companion. The informant refused to identify himself. The officers found two men matching the informant's description in the parking lot of a nearby restaurant, accompanied by a third man. When they saw the police officers, they began to walk away. One of the officers asked Valentine to come and place his hands on the car; Valentine tried to charge past him, and, as he did so, Valentine's gun fell to the ground. There, we attached great weight to the fact that the informant had just witnessed a crime. We also attributed greater reliability to the informant's tip than to an anonymous phone call because the officers had an opportunity to appraise the witness's credibility through observation. We noted specifically that we were concerned not so much with whether the informant could be traced as whether the tip should be deemed sufficiently trustworthy in light of the total circumstances. Id. at 355. We also recognized in Valentine, as the Supreme Court had stated in Gates and has recently reaffirmed in Arvizu, that acts 11 that in isolation may be innocent in itself  or at least susceptible to an innocent interpretation, may collectively amount to reasonable suspicion. 534 U.S. at ___; 122 S. Ct. at 751. The other factor present in Valentine that has been absent in many of the cases that we have found inadequate to support a reasonable suspicion is the timing of the information relative to the commission of a crime, particularly a crime of violence. When criminal activity is reported to be ongoing, the public expects the police to take action based on the reports. As we expressed in Valentine, if the police officers had done nothing and continued on their way after receiving the informant's tip, the officers would have been remiss. 232 F.3d at 356. In upholding the stop as reasonable, we distinguished United States v. Ubiles, 224 F.3d 213 (3d Cir. 2000), a case factually similar to Valentine. In Ubiles, a man approached a group of officers during a festival to indicate that there was a man in the crowd whom he had seen with a gun. The officers frisked the identified man and recovered a gun. However, in the Virgin Islands, such gun possession is not illegal, and the informant never alleged that any illegal activity had occurred or would occur. Id. at 215. In drawing the distinction, we emphasized that officers can consider the time and area, as well as suspicious responses-- in Valentine, the walking away upon seeing the officers -- in determining whether suspicion is reasonable. Id . at 356-57. Additionally, we noted that in Valentine, unlike in Ubiles, the mere possession of a gun without a permit was illegal. Id. We also note that, four years before J.L., we invalidated a stop in a high-crime area where the anonymous tip called in to the police described a person, his attire, and his location and reported that he was selling drugs. United States v. Roberson, 90 F.3d 75, 79-80 (3d Cir. 1996). When the officers arrived at the location, they saw a person who matched the description, first standing on the corner, then talking to someone in a car. Id. at 80. It was early evening, and the officers testified that Roberson's behavior was normal for the neighborhood; there was nothing suspicious about his presence on the corner nor the rate at which he walked to the car. Id. Under the circumstances, 12 we found that the anonymous and bare-bones tip that could have been generated by a caller looking out his window was inadequate. An individual's presence in a residential neighborhood, even at a hot corner known for drug sales, could not, of itself, give rise to a reasonable suspicion justifying the investigative stop of Mr. Roberson. Id. at 79-80.