Court Opinion

ID: 9726287
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 12:40:59.728911+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:25.350173
License: Public Domain

GUSTAFSON, J.
I dissent.
The court admits that in the case at bench we have an “informer who does not expressly purport to speak from his own knowledge or to disclose the source of his information.” Clearly Officer Cody from what he was told by the informer could not have obtained either an arrest warrant or a search warrant. (Aguilar v. Texas (1964) 378 U.S. 108 [12 L.Ed.2d 723, 84 S.Ct. 1509]; People v. Hamilton (1969) 71 Cal.2d 176 [77 Cal.Rptr. 785, 454 P.2d 681].)
But Officer Cody then proceeded by his own observation to verify part of what the informer had told him. The officer observed defendant and Washington leave Washington’s house with three suitcases and travel to the airport. The information which Officer Cody did not verify by his observation was that the suitcases contained marijuana. The court holds first that the information which was verified furnished probable cause for the arrest and search under the doctrine of Draper v. United States (1959) 358 U.S. 307 [3 L.Ed.2d 327, 79 S.Ct. 329].
I think that Draper is of doubtful validity today. Nothing which the officer in Draper verified by his observation incriminated the defendant. The court referred to the only incriminating fact (“that Draper would have the heroin with him”) as the “remaining unverified bit of [the informer’s] information.” Mr. Justice White, concurring in Spinelli v. United States (1969) 393 U.S. 410 [21 L.Ed.2d 637, 89 S.Ct. 584], expresses his doubts about the Draper case and notes that the four man majority opinion in Spinelli “while seemingly embracing Draper, confines that case to its own facts.” I think Mr. Justice White’s analysis is correct because the majority opinion in Spinelli states that verification of “only innocent-seeming activity and data” is not enough and that the test (either for a valid warrantless *32arrest or for the issuance of a valid arrest warrant) is the extent of the information regarding the “accused’s criminal activity.” In Draper the verification was of “only innocent-seeming activity and data” and there was no verification of Draper’s “criminal activity."
The criminal activity in the case at bench was that Washington was selling marijuana to the defendant and that the defendant was about to take the marijuana out of this state. As in Spinelli, the informer’s report “could easily have been obtained from an offhand remark heard at a neighborhood bar.” Since Officer Cody did not see fit to ascertain from the informer the source of his information concerning the criminal activity and since Officer Cody did not verify the criminal activity by his own observation, I think that under Spinelli there was no probable cause for arresting the defendant.
The temptation is great, in a case such as this where defendant admitted her guilt, to find that the arrest and search were valid. But the Fourth Amendment protects all persons, not only those who are criminals. Suppose that Officer Cody found no marijuana when he opened the suitcases. Defendant then would have been subjected to the annoyance, embarrassment and humiliation of an officer’s looking at items in her suitcases which were not meant for his eyes.
Thousands of persons depart from Los Angeles International Airport each day. It is not uncommon that someone will know when a traveler plans to leave his home, hotel or other place of residence and with whom he will drive to the airport. If an anonymous reliable informer reports, without disclosing how he obtained his information, that the traveler is carrying contraband in a suitcase and if verification by the officer that the traveler left his place of residence as predicted by the informer suffices to give the officer probable cause to believe that the traveler is carrying contraband, searches of the' effects of countless innocent persons may become commonplace. It is not too much to require that the officer ascertain that the information concerning the criminal activity is reliable before the officer embarks on an intrusion of the privacy of the traveler.
I think the court is clearly wrong in holding that an alternate and independent basis for upholding the arrest and search is that Officer Cody “would have been derelict in his duty had he not” made the arrest and search. Surely an officer has no duty to search or arrest when forbidden to do so by the Fourth Amendment. I am aware of no principle that an arrest or a search which would otherwise be invalid satisfies the Fourth Amendment if it is undertaken “to prevent the probable addition of a major quantity of marijuana to the already too large stream of illicit commerce.” Draper said no such thing. While Draper said that the officer’s *33duty was to pursue the information, it upheld the arrest (in a decision joined in by only four Justices now on the court) because from the information known to him the officer “had probable cause ... to believe that [Draper] was committing a violation of the laws of the United States relating to narcotic drugs at the time he arrested him.”
I would reverse the judgment.