Court Opinion

ID: 9701223
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 22:11:17.58284+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:21.071463
License: Public Domain

*411Skoglund, J.,
concurring. The dissent asks, “what would the Supreme Court do” if confronted with the facts in this case and expresses concern that the majority has created an “exception to our established search and seizure jurisprudence for which there is no precedent and no conceivable limit.” 171 Vt. at 423, 765 A.2d at 877. While I fully agree with the reasoning of the majority in the case at bar, I write in concurrence to dispel the concerns held by the dissent. This task is not an easy one. “Interpretation of the fourth amendment is not a model of intellectual consistency.” Edmond v. Goldsmith, 183 F.3d 659, 668 (7th Cir. 1999).
As the opening sentence in Terry v. Ohio stated: “This case presents serious questions concerning the role of the Fourth Amendment in the confrontation on the street between the citizen and the policeman investigating suspicious circumstances.” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 4 (1968). In Terry, the Court first recognized the authority of law enforcement officers to stop and frisk an individual absent probable cause for an arrest. Subsequent decisions of the Court have added dimension to the scope of Terry and extended its holding into areas probably not contemplated when the decision was rendered in 1968, decisions that, as discussed below, have proved disturbing to several respected Justices of that Court.
Prior to Terry, the Court had recognized that the “Fourth Amendment’s proper function is to constrain, not against all intrusions as such, but against intrusions which are not justified in the circumstances, or which are made in an improper manner.” Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 768 (1966).1 The Court echoed Schmerber in Terry when it wrote, “[o]f course, the specific content and incidents of this right must be shaped by the context in which it is asserted. For ‘what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.’” Terry, 392 U.S. at 9 (quoting Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206, 222 (1960)).
To answer the question “what would the Court do in this case?” we need to examine what it has found to be “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment and why, and to review how it has handled other cases in which the basis of the officer’s suspicion comes not from personal observation but rather from an informant’s tip.
*412Terry is the seminal case in the area and the logical place to start. There, an officer found the behaviors of two men to be suspicious, testifying that “they didn’t look right to me at the time.” 392 U.S. at 5. The officer observed the men as they repeatedly took turns walking a short distance down the street and looking into a store window. The officer suspected they were “casing a job, a stick-up.” Id. at 6. Eventually, the officer approached them, asked their names, received a mumbled response, grabbed Terry, spun him around and patted down the outside of his clothing for weapons. A gun was recovered and Terry was charged with carrying a concealed weapon.
The Court began its analysis in Terry by identifying the “central inquiry under the Fourth Amendment — the reasonableness in all the circumstances of the particular governmental invasion of a citizen’s personal security.” Id. at 19. “[WJould the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or search ‘warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief’ that the action taken was appropriate?” Id. at 21-22. It found that the officer was discharging a legitimate investigative function when he approached Terry and his companions after viewing their suspicious behavior. “It would have been poor police work indeed for an officer of 30 years’ experience in the detection of thievery from stores in this same neighborhood to have failed to investigate this behavior further.” Id. at 23.
The Court emphasized, however, that the propriety of the stop was not the crux of the case. Rather, it was the officer’s “invasion of Terry’s personal security by searching him for weapons in the course of that investigation.” Id. The Court’s analysis of the frisk focused on the safety of law enforcement officers in their daily interactions with suspected criminals and ordinary citizens, remarking: “American criminals have a long tradition of armed violence, and every year in this country many law enforcement officers are killed in the line of duty, and thousands more are wounded.” Id. The Court found no offense to the Fourth Amendment when the officer took necessary measures to determine if the men were in fact carrying weapons.
Thus, from Terry we take the test of whether the officer’s action was justified at its inception, and whether it was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place, recognizing that we deal in this case not with a search, but only with a limited seizure, a brief investigatory detention of a vehicle on a public highway. See Michigan Dep’t of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. *413444, 451 (1990) (level of intrusion of brief roadside sobriety checkpoint “is slight”).2
To adequately appreciate the significance of Terry and its progeny for this and other cases one need look no further than the opinions of the dissenting Justices. Justice Douglas was the lone dissenter in Terry, and he bitterly decried the demise of the requirement that a police officer have probable cause before effecting a search and seizure without a warrant, alleging that the decision was in response to “powerful hydraulic pressures” to “water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand.” 392 U.S. at 39.
Four years after Terry, the Court considered whether a stop and frisk had to be based on the officer’s personal observations, and answered the question with an emphatic “no.” In Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S. 143 (1972), an informant who had previously provided information to the officer approached the officer at 2:15 a.m. and informed him that an individual seated in a nearby vehicle was carrying narcotics and had a gun at his waist. The officer went to the car, tapped on the car window and asked the occupant, Williams, to open the door. Instead of opening the door, Williams rolled down the window. The officer quickly reached into the car and removed a gun from Williams’ waistband. Williams was tried and convicted of possession of a handgun and possession of heroin found during a full search incident to his arrest on a weapons charge.
The Court applied the test it had developed in Terry — whether the officer’s action was justified at its inception and whether it was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place — and upheld the seizure. The majority reasoned that the officer was acting on a tip from an informant he knew, who had provided information previously, and whose information was immediately corroborated at the scene when the officer reached into the car window and retrieved the gun that the informant said would be there. The Court upheld the search as well, holding that it “constituted a limited intrusion designed to insure [the officer’s] safety.” Id. at 148. In so holding, the majority noted that the informant could have been subject to immediate arrest for making a false complaint had his information not been verified.
*414Again, reading the dissenting opinions in Adams illuminates the decision’s broad significance. This time Justices Douglas, Marshall and Brennan dissented. Justice Douglas opined that the “easy extension of Terry v. Ohio ... to ‘possessory offenses’ is a serious intrusion on Fourth Amendment safeguards.” Id. at 151. Justice Brennan rued the extension of Terry to possessory offenses as well, arguing that the Terry rule was intended only for serious cases of imminent danger or of harm recently perpetrated to persons or property, not to conventional possessory offenses. Id. at 153 (quoting Williams v. Adams, 436 F.2d 30, 39 (2d Cir. 1970) (Friendly, J., dissenting)). Justice Brennan also shared the concerns expressed by the dissenting lower court judge, Judge Friendly, who noted that there was no guarantee of a patrolling officer’s veracity when he testifies to a “tip” from an unnamed informer. (The informant was never named during the trial of defendant.) Justice Marshall focused his analysis on the quality of the informant’s contribution — the only basis for sustaining the officer’s actions — concluding that it was insufficient to be considered reliable. Id. at 155-59. He noted that the only other time this particular informant had provided information to the officer, it did not involve guns or narcotics and had, in fact, proved to be unsubstantiated. Further, there was no evidence the informant could identify narcotics, even if he could identify a 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 *415could 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 would be 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 unparticularized suspicion or hunch. The Fourth Amendment requires some minimal level of objective justification for making the stop.” Id. at 329-30 (quoting United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 7 (1989)) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted; alteration in original).
*416The Court in White elaborated further on the distinction between reasonable suspicion and probable cause:
Reasonable suspicion is a less demanding standard than probable cause not only in the sense that reasonable suspicion can be established with information that is different in quantity or content than that required to establish probable cause, but also in the sense that reasonable suspicion can arise from information that is less reliable than that required to show probable cause.
Id. at 330.
Applying this standard, the Court found, under the totality of the circumstances, that the anonymous tip, as corroborated by the officers, exhibited sufficient indicia of reliability to justify the investigatory stop of the car. In so holding, the Court placed considerable reliance on the fact that the anonymous tip included predictions of future actions by White, specifically her travel towards the predicted destination. Again, the dissenting opinions are revealing. Justice Stevens, writing for Justices Brennan and Marshall, noted that “Millions of people leave their apartments at about the same time every day carrying an attaché case and heading for a destination known to their neighbors. ... An anonymous neighbor’s prediction about somebody’s time of departure and probable destination is anything but a reliable basis for assuming that the commuter is in possession of an illegal substance — particularly when the person is not even carrying the attaché case described by the tipster.” Id. at 333. The dissent also raised concerns about an officer’s veracity in claiming to have received an anonymous tip. “[Ujnder the Court’s holding, every citizen is subject to being seized and questioned by any officer who is prepared to testify that the warrantless stop was based on an anonymous tip predicting whatever conduct the officer just observed.” Id.
The dissent in White pointedly illustrates the Court’s generous approach to the finding of reasonable suspicion on the basis of an anonymous informant’s tip. Furthermore, while White relied heavily on the predictive information of the suspect’s itinerary, other federal courts interpreting White have held that predictive information may be sufficient, but is not necessary, to establish reasonable suspicion. See, e.g., United States v. Gibson, 64 F.3d 617, 623 (11th Cir. 1995) (“White does not prevent law enforcement officers from relying and acting on anonymous tips when the information to be corroborated *417does not refer to future actions but instead details present circumstances.”); United States v. Bold, 19 F.3d 99, 104 (2d Cir. 1994) (“There is nothing in White that precludes police from acting on an anonymous tip when the information to be corroborated refers to present rather than future actions.”).
Thus, notwithstanding the fact that the suspect in the case before us was traveling on a public access highway and that little precognition was needed to deduce that the car would continue on that highway, the tip does not fail for lack of predictive information. Moreover, as noted earlier, the facts here do not present the same potential for law-enforcement fabrication of anonymous tips that so concerned the dissenters in Adams and White.
Recently, the Court decided Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000), a decision that further spotlights the Court’s liberal standards for finding “reasonable suspicion.” In this case Wardlow, who had simply been standing next to a building, fled upon seeing a four car police caravan driving by, apparently on its way to an area known for heavy narcotics trafficking. Officers Nolan and Harvey chased him down and conducted a protective pat-down search for weapons. Discovering a .38 caliber handgun, the officers arrested Wardlow for unlawful use of a weapon by a felon. He was convicted of same in a bench trial.
The Illinois Appellate Court reversed Wardlow’s conviction, concluding that the gun should have been suppressed because the officer lacked reasonable suspicion sufficient to justify an investigative stop pursuant to Terry. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed, holding that sudden flight in a high crime area does not create a reasonable suspicion justifying a Terry stop. In a split decision, the Supreme Court reversed, deciding the case solely on the question of whether the initial stop was supported by reasonable suspicion. The Court found that the location of the stop (a high crime area), coupled with Wardlow’s actions — he fled — were sufficiently suspicious to warrant further investigation. It wrote: “[T]he determination of reasonable suspicion must be based on commonsense judgments and inferences about human behavior. . . . Officer Nolan was justified in suspecting that Wardlow was involved in criminal activity, and, therefore, in investigating further.” Id. at 125. While conceding that there may be innocent reasons for fleeing from the police and, therefore, that flight is not necessarily indicative of ongoing criminal activity, the Court nevertheless re-emphasized the holding of Terry that the officers could detain the individual to resolve the ambiguity presented.
*418Four Justices dissented from the Court’s conclusion that officer Nolan had reasonable suspicion sufficient to stop Wardlow. As Justice Stevens, who authored the dissenting opinion, succinctly stated, “I am not persuaded that the mere fact that someone standing on a sidewalk looked in the direction of a passing car before starting to run is sufficient to justify a forcible stop and frisk.” Id. at 140. While Wardlow did not involve an anonymous tip but rather the observations of the apprehending police officers, it does illustrate how lean the facts of suspicious circumstances may be and still weigh in favor of the law enforcement officer’s actions. Most recently, in March of this year, the Court decided Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266, 120 S. Ct. 1375 (2000). Contrary to the dissent’s assertion, Florida v. J.L is not a closely analogous case. It does, however, reveal where the Court will draw the line when anonymous callers allege concealed criminal activity.
The facts in J.L. are set forth in the majority and dissenting opinions, so I mention them only briefly. In J.L. the police received an anonymous tip of concealed wrongdoing, specifically that a person was carrying a gun. The Court, in a unanimous decision, held that such a tip was insufficient to justify a police officer’s stop and frisk of that person, because, while the tip gave an accurate description of a subject’s readily observable location and appearance, it did not show “that the tipster ha[d] knowledge of concealed criminal activity. The reasonable suspicion here at issue requires that a tip be rehable in its assertion of illegality, not just in its tendency to identify a determinate person.” Id. at 272, 120 S. Ct. at 1379.
The Court also rejected the State’s argument that the Terry analysis should be modified to license a “firearm exception.” Id. It reasoned that an automatic firearm exception to the established reliability analysis would “rove too far,” enabling anyone to harass another by setting in motion intrusive, embarrassing police searches by merely placing an anonymous call alleging the subject was carrying a gun or even narcotics. Id. “As we clarified when we made indicia of reliability critical in Adams and White, the Fourth Amendment is not so easily satisfied.” Id. at 273, 120 S. Ct. at 1380.
All of which virtually compels me to ask: If J.L. had turned on his heel and run away when he saw the police officer’s approach, as Wardlow had done, would the Court have found the police justified in their response under the Fourth Amendment? Probably so, if the bus stop was in a “high crime” area.
It is also difficult to reconcile the decision in J.L. with the Court’s earlier holding in Adams, remembering that there was no evidence in *419that case to show the basis of the anonymous informant’s knowledge that the defendant, a man sitting in a car readily observable by anyone walking by, was carrying narcotics, the only assertion of an illegality involved.
Nevertheless, as the majority here aptly notes, the Court in J.L. stressed that its decision was closely confined to the facts: “The facts of this case do not require us to speculate about the circumstances under which the danger alleged in an anonymous tip might be so great as to justify a search even without a showing of reliability.” Id. at 273, 120 S. Ct. at 1380. The Court hypothesized that a report of a person carrying a bomb as an example of a tip that might require less indicia of reliability than a report of a person carrying a gun. It is important to note that both are allegations of possessory offenses.
Which brings me to what I believe has been the dominant and determinative factor in the Court’s development of Fourth Amendment search and seizure law — the unrelenting extension of the principles of Terry to cases where the suspected illegal activity is a possessory offense. Florida v. J.L. (gun), Alabama v. White (drugs), United States v. Sokolow (drugs) and Adams v. Williams (drugs and gun) all involved possessory offenses. The cases relied on by the dissent, State v. Altieri, 951 P.2d 866, 867 (Ariz. 1997) (drugs),3 Commonwealth v. Lyons, 564 N.E.2d 390, 391 (Mass. 1990) (drugs), State v. Kennison, 590 A.2d 1099, 1100 (N.H. 1991) (drugs), United States v. Soto-Cervantes, 138 F.3d 1319, 1321 (10th Cir. 1998) (drugs), United States v. Roberson, 90 F.3d 75, 79 (3d Cir. 1996) (drugs), all involve possessory offenses. The concerns expressed by Justices Douglas, Brennan and Marshall have receded into history. Application of Terry principles to police actions involving such offenses has become standard.
These decisions are significant, not least because the case before us is so clearly distinguishable. The offense alleged here did not involve a concealed crime — a possessory offense. What was described in the police dispatch to the arresting officer was a crime in progress, carried out in public, identifiable and observable by anyone in sight of *420its commission. Unlike the tip alleged in White — that White was carrying narcotics — or in Adams — that the defendant was carrying narcotics and a gun — here a total stranger could have observed defendant’s driving abilities. No intimate or confidential relationship was required to support the accuracy of the observation. The caller simply reported a contemporaneous observation of criminal activity taking place in his line of sight. (Obviously, the caller may have used words other than “erratic driving” to describe what was observed, and the dispatcher may have reduced the tipster’s information to police lingo before issuing the BOL.)
Thus, to return to the question posed at the beginning — “what would the Supreme Court do under the facts of this case?” — I suggest that it would begin by observing that the veracity, reliability, and basis of the tipster’s knowledge must be evaluated under the lesser standard of reasonable suspicion. If probable cause — the level of suspicion adequate to support a custodial arrest that may last for days — is no more than a 50% likelihood, and reasonable suspicion sufficient to support a frisk is something less than probable cause, then plainly an even lower level of probability is required of a brief investigative stop that poses less intrusion than a physical search of the person. The Court would, I believe, evaluate the governmental interest involved — here, assuring that drunks are quickly removed from our roads — and balance that interest against the reasonableness of the minimal intrusion on the citizen’s personal security.
The Court, in fact, performed such a balancing in Sitz, where, in evaluating Michigan’s use of highway sobriety checkpoints, it weighed the intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests against the State’s interest in preventing drunk driving. Sitz, 496 U.S. at 451. It found the highway sobriety checkpoint program to be in conformity with the Fourth Amendment. The Court concluded that the balance favored allowing sobriety checkpoint stops, as the “magnitude of the drunken driving problem” was beyond serious dispute, and the “weight bearing on the other scale — the measure of the intrusion on motorists stopped briefly at sobriety checkpoints — is slight.” Id.; see also United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 879-80 (1975) (noting that when an officer stops an automobile and questions its occupants, “the intrusion is modest”).
Returning to the test established in Terry: Would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the search and seizure warrant a person of reasonable caution to believe that the action taken was appropriate? Where, as here, the level of objective *421justification necessary to effectuate the stop is minimal, I believe the conclusion is inescapable that it would. As the court observed in State v. Tucker, 878 P.2d 855, 858 (Kan. Ct. App. 1994), this case necessarily involves “the ever-changing equation used to balance the rights of an individual to be free from unwarranted intrusions of his or her freedom of movement and right to privacy with the right of the public to be protected from unreasonable danger. This equation and the balance change with the facts presented.” The risk to the public in this case was not that an illegal drug or a concealed weapon might go undetected. This risk here was a drunk driver maneuvering a thousand pounds of steel, glass and chrome down a public road. I have no doubt that, under the totality of the circumstances presented, the Supreme Court would conclude the stop did no violence to the protections embodied in the Fourth Amendment.
The dissent asserts otherwise, suggesting that the majority opinion gives the public “the power to cause the search or seizure of a person driving a car.” 171 Vt. at 423, 765 A.2d at 877.1 agree. But is that not what we invite when we encourage the public to “GET A DWI” and provide an “800” telephone number for them to call when they observe what they believe to be drunk driving? And do we not benefit when the citizenry cooperates with law enforcement to remove dangerous drivers from our highways? If the caller is wrong, if the driver is not impaired, the driver will proceed on his or her journey after a brief roadside detention. As the Court in Wardlow wrote, “In allowing such detentions, Terry accepts the risk that officers may stop innocent people.” 528 U.S. at 126. If the caller is correct, however, a drunk driver will have been removed from the streets. As one commentator has explained: “Because the very purpose of [investigatory] stops is to clarify ambiguous situations, ‘even if it was equally probable that the vehicle or its occupants were innocent of any wrongdoing, police must be permitted to act before their reasonable belief is verified by escape or fruition of the harm it was their duty to prevent.’” 2 W LaFave, et al., Criminal Frocedure § 3.8, at 242 (2d ed. 1999) (quoting United States v. Holland, 510 F.2d 453, 455 (9th Cir. 1975)) (emphasis in original).4
*422I am compelled to make one additional comment on this case. When an informant places an anonymous telephone call to the police, “the informant has not placed his credibility at risk and can lie with impunity.” J.L., 529 U.S. at 275, 120 S. Ct. at 1381 (Kennedy, J., concurring). Justice Kennedy went on to observe, however, that there may be “many indicia of reliability respecting anonymous tips” that the cases had not explored. Id. at 274, 120 S. Ct. at 1380-81. In J.L., however, the record in this regard was barren; it did not show whether some notation or other documentation of the call was made either by a voice recording or tracing the call to a telephone number.
The record in this case does not reveal much more. We know the information came to the arresting officer by way of a radio dispatch from the Vermont State Police dispatcher requesting that officers be on the lookout for a particularly described vehicle being operated erratically on I-89.5 Nevertheless, with the advent of instant caller-identification, widely available and in use by the public and the police, there is increasing awareness of the lack of true anonymity in today’s telecommunication world. I am equally certain that the general public is well aware of the fact that it is a crime to make a false report to police. See 13 V.S.A. § 1754.
The possibility that a citizen may provide an erroneous anonymous tip out of spite or general evil intentions should not restrain law enforcement officers from responding when it is reasonable to do so. It is the oppressive and unwarranted actions of government that the Fourth Amendment protects against. The Constitution is not violated when we allow the police to assume good faith on the part of the citizens of our state, just long enough to effectuate a brief, limited *423roadside stop to determine if the tip came from a prankster or a concerned fellow traveler.
For these reasons, I concur in the Court’s reasoning and decision to affirm the judgment. I am authorized to state that Chief Justice Amestoy joins in this concurring opinion.

The Fourth Amendment provides that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” U.S. Const, amend. IV

The sequel to the seizure — the interaction between the officer and the driver and the officer’s observations of impairment from outside the car — did not rise to the level of a search as that term has been interpreted by the Court. See United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 707 (1983); Texas v. Brown, 460 U.S. 730, 739-40 (1983).

 Altieri dealt with an anonymous tip about possession of marijuana. The Arizona court found the tip insufficient to provide reasonable suspicion for the stop. Altieri does not mention an earlier Arizona Court of Appeals case, State v. Robles, 831 P.2d 440 (Ariz. Ct. App. 1992), which upheld the stop of a pickup truck based on a dispatch to the arresting officer that a blue pickup truck with primer spots was driving erratically in a certain area with no description of the driver or license number. Officers located a vehicle matching the description and stopped the truck without observing any erratic driving.

 We recently decided that the standard of reasonable grounds, as used in YR.Cr.B 41.1 governing nontestimonial identification orders (NTO), was satisfied by the information available to the police about a suspect in an unsolved murder. In In re Nontestimonial Identification Order Directed to R.H., 171 Vt. 227, 762 A.2d 1239 (2000), we acknowledged that there was no direct evidence of defendant’s involvement in the crime, no witnesses placing him at the scene, and he made no statement that could be interpreted *422as demonstrating responsibility. All the police knew was that the suspect was familiar with the remote area in which the crime occurred and had a long history of violence against women, the most recent episode of which involved conduct consistent with how the murder victim’s killer must have acted. We concluded that the facts supporting defendant’s involvement “are specific and articulable” and supported a “reasonable suspicion” that defendant had killed the victim sufficient to warrant issuance of the NTO. Id. at 232, 762 A.2d at 1243. We held that this case “involved more than a hunch.” Id. at 233, 762 A.2d at 1243. After execution of the NTO-testing of DNA recovered from the victim’s body-the suspect was cleared. The failure of the DNA match did not, however, negate the reasonable-suspicion finding.

I repeat with regret the comment made by Justice Dooley in his dissent in State v. Lamb, 168 Vt. 194, 203 n.*, 720 A.2d 1101, 1107 n.* (1998) (Dooley, J., dissenting): “I can’t help believe, however, that this case is before us because the State never obtained evidence from the dispatcher who could have provided more information on the tip.” Again we have a case where we must assume that the tip was anonymous, though the trial court never expressly found it so, because the State failed to present evidence from the dispatcher who could have provided more information about the tip.