Court Opinion

ID: 9526276
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:14:59.272992+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:19:17.093099
License: Public Domain

Gillerman, J.
(dissenting, with whom Greenberg, J., joins). The affidavit is inadequate for a number of reasons. The McCalabs were named and identified informants, and the credibility requirement may be relaxed where the named informant is also an eyewitness to or participant in the crime being investigated. See Commonwealth v. Atchue, 393 Mass. 343, 347-348 (1984). However, the McCalabs were not eyewitnesses to any criminal activity, see Commonwealth v. Snyder, 413 Mass. 521, 529 (1992); Commonwealth v. Carey, 407 Mass. 528, 534 n.4 (1990), and the information they reported to the police, at the most, provided suspicion, not probable cause, to believe that evidence of criminal activity would be found in apartment #5. Absent information that the persons entering and leaving apartment #5 had some known or suspected connection with illegal drug activity, such as known drug users as in Commonwealth v. Valdez, 402 Mass. 65, 71 (1988), or even suspected drug users or *772dealers as in Commonwealth v. Hall, 366 Mass. 790, 798 (1975), the mere fact of the appearance of a large number of unidentified visitors — not an incriminating event under a variety of circumstances, as the Commonwealth’s brief conceded — is not an adequate basis for an inference that evidence of criminal activity is probably in apartment #5.
The affidavit fares only slightly better on the basis of the allegations regarding the activities of CR1. Most important, CR1 was not an informant in the usual sense. There are no allegations that CR1, in the past, provided “tips” to the police that criminal business had occurred, was occurring, or is proposed for the future. See 1 LaFave, Search and Seizure § 3.3, at 611 (2d ed 1987). The affidavit merely recites that in the past CR1 had made controlled buys of controlled substances leading to arrests and the seizures of drugs; absent from the affidavit is any reference to the fact that the controlled buys were made as a result of information CR1 had brought to the police. So, too, in this case, the information about apartment #5 was disclosed by the McCalabs, not CR1, and the assigned task of CR1 was simply to make a controlled buy as directed by the police. See People v. Mason, 132 Cal. App. 3d 594, 599-600 (1982) (previous participation in controlled buys, without more, insufficient to establish informant’s credibility); LaFave, supra § 3.3(b), at 631 (“The mere fact that the informant was given money and sent to a particular place to meet a suspect and then returned with narcotics, all under the close surveillance of police, alone indicates very little about the informer’s credibility in the role of a reporter of facts when he is not under such close supervision”).
While the past participation of CR1 in controlled buys leading to arrests and seizures of contraband may be entitled to some weight on the issue of his reliability, that past activity, standing alone, is not sufficient to establish his veracity. The mere fact of participation in controlled buys in the past, under circumstances left undescribed, and which are unconnected to the criminal activity under investigation in the case before the court, is substantially different from participation *773in an executed controlled buy from the defendant which, as in Commonwealth v. Benlien, 27 Mass. App. Ct. 834, 838 (1989), yields up material evidence of the defendant’s suspected criminal activity. In this case, then, the past performance of CR1, which, does not appear to have been anything more than following police instructions, is not enough, without additional facts, to establish the credibility of CR1, and, therefore, collateral information generated by CR1 (observation of a trail of marihuana smoke emerging from apartment #5) in the course of the failed controlled buy from the defendant does not provide probable cause for a search warrant. More is needed by the Commonwealth to justify the issuance of the search warrant.
Of course, independent corroborating allegations in the affidavit “may supplement the informant’s tip to support a finding of probable cause.” Commonwealth v. Reddington, 395 Mass. 315, 322 (1985). At some unidentified time, the police attempted to corroborate the new information, but they, too, failed in the task. What they did was proceed to the apartment house within which, on the second floor, were three apartments, of which apartment #5 was one. There, in the hallway outside apartment #5, they smelled marihuana smoke. The corrobotation that is lacking is the observation that the police saw and smelled marihuana smoke emerging from the doorway of apartment #5. This omission is no “hypertechnical” quibble, see Commonwealth v. Mendez, 32 Mass. App. Ct. 928, 929 (1992), and cases cited, for the affidavit is barren of any reliable information that evidence of drugs was to be found inside apartment #5. Contrast United States v. Sweeney, 688 F.2d 1131, 1135, 1137-1138 (7th Cir. 1982) (officer smelled odor of chemical being processed into contraband inside defendant’s house while standing at the open front door). The limited observations of the police do not preclude at least three other equally plausible explanations for the marihuana smoke in the second floor hallway outside the door of apartment #5: the marihuana smoke had earlier come from either, or both, of the two other apartments on the same floor, or it came from a person passing *774through the hallway to exit the building. By failing to verify that there was smoke of burning marihuana inside the apartment, or emerging from it, the police failed to corroborate the information received from CR1, and thus left to speculation whether the source of the smoke was inside apartment #5 or elsewhere.1
The absence of independent police corroboration is not cured by combining the information from CR1, which, as we have said, carried no warrant of credibility, with the statements the McCalabs made to the police. The suspicions of the McCalabs concerning activities seen only by them — unlike the independent police corroboration of predictions made by an informant, as in Draper v. United States, 358 U.S. 307, 309-310 (1959) — do not provide the factual basis required to establish either the general veracity of CR1 or the “specific reliability” of his statement. See Commonwealth v. Borges, 395 Mass. 788, 794 (1985). Thus, Aguilar-Spinelli remains unsatisfied. See Commonwealth v. Upton, 394 Mass. at 375-376 (“Each prong of the Anguilar-Spinelli test — the basis of knowledge and the veracity of the informant' — presents an independently important consideration. We have said that independent police corroboration can make up for deficiencies in either or both prongs of the Aguilar-Spinelli test. ... We reiterate today, however, that each element of the test must be separately considered and satisfied or supplemented in some other way”). Close adherence to the tests of Aguilar-Spinelli is essential to the preservation of the rights protected by art. 14 of the Declaration of Rights of the Constitution of the Commonwealth, see Commonwealth v. Upton, supra at 376, and while hypertechnical analysis is to be avoided, id. at 374, so too is any analysis which fails to recognize that without satisfaction of those underlying tests, art. 14 itself is put in jeopardy. Compare Note, Constitutional Stare Decisis, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1344, 1353 n.63 *775(1990) (“No one would suggest . . . that the text of the fourth amendment clearly determines the existence of probable cause in every stop-and-frisk case. Indeed, in such cases the Court does not reconsider norms announced by the text; instead, it applies the tests it has formulated to vindicate those norms”).
In these circumstances, the Commonwealth has not met its burden of producing an affidavit which provides a substantial basis for concluding that there was evidence of criminal activity in apartment #5. Commonwealth v. Stewart, 358 Mass. 747, 749 (1971). See Commonwealth v. Kaufman, 381 Mass. 301, 305 (1980) (“here we have an equivocal circumstance distant from any inference that the magistrate could validly make . . .”). Contrast Commonwealth v. Pacheco, 21 Mass. App. Ct. 565, 566-567 (1985).
Finally, the allegations in the affidavit concerning the three prior arrests of Monterosso for drug activity are no help to the Commonwealth because there was no reliable information in the affidavit which tied the defendant’s residence (apartment #5) to past illegal drug transactions. See Commonwealth v. Kaufman, 381 Mass. at 304 (“Notably absent is reliable specific information from any quarter placing illegal drugs or drug transactions there in the past . . .”); Commonwealth v. Olivares, 30 Mass. App. Ct. 596, 599-601 (1991). Further, the three prior arrests — almost two years before the execution of the warrant — are “too remote in time to give rise to an inference that drugs would be present when the warrant was issued.” Commonwealth v. Malone, 24 Mass. App. Ct. 70, 73 (1987) (fourteen-month hiatus).
For the foregoing reasons, the motion to suppress should have been allowed, and the three judgments (possession with intent to distribute marihuana, cocaine, and LSD) should be reversed, and the verdicts set aside.

 The affidavit recites that the police “followed a distinct odor trail of marihuana [smoke] to the door of apartment #5,” This is nothing more than an assertion that there was an odor of marihuana smoke outside apartment #5, leaving the source of that smoke to speculation.