Court Opinion

ID: 9539288
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:01:40.16782+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:58:40.995231
License: Public Domain

BENTON, J.,
dissenting.
The United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266, 120 S.Ct. 1375, 146 L.Ed.2d 254 (2000), could not be clearer. Without a dissent, the Court *653“h[e]ld that an anonymous tip lacking indicia of reliability ... does not justify a stop and frisk whenever and however it alleges the illegal possession of a firearm.” Id. at 274, 120 S.Ct. at 1380.
I believe the majority misreads the import of J.L. when concluding that the decision turned upon a finding that the informant had not relayed to the police information about criminal conduct. Answering “[t]he question ... whether an anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun, is without more, sufficient to justify a police officer’s stop and frisk of that person,” 529 U.S. at 268, 120 S.Ct. at 1377, the Supreme Court noted that “ ‘an anonymous tip alone seldom demonstrates the informant’s basis of knowledge or veracity.’ ” Id. at 270, 120 S.Ct. at 1378 (quoting Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325, 329, 110 S.Ct. 2412, 2416, 110 L.Ed.2d 301 (1990)). On facts virtually identical to this case, the Court concluded the informant’s tip was not proved reliable and reached the holding recited above.
If, as the majority opinion here suggests, the issue in J.L. concerned the failure of the informant’s tip to convey evidence of criminal conduct, the resolution of that case would not have required any discussion about the informant’s reliability. In that circumstance, regardless of the informant’s reliability, the officer would have been operating only on a bare suspicion and would not have had a basis to detain J.L. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 27, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 1883, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968) (holding that a police officer may not detain a person for investigative purposes based on “his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or ‘hunch’ ” that criminal activity may be occurring). See also Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47, 99 S.Ct. 2637, 61 L.Ed.2d 357 (1979). Significantly, the Supreme Court’s decision in J.L. notes that “[ajpart from the tip, the officers had no reason to suspect any of the three [men] of illegal conduct.” Id. at 268, 120 S.Ct. at 1377 (emphasis added). Therefore, the majority opinion’s assertion that the *654tip in J.L. failed to convey information about criminal conduct is simply wrong.
Explaining further the deficiency in the proof of the reliability of the informant’s tip, the Supreme Court noted the following:
The tip in the instant case lacked the moderate indicia of reliability present in White and essential to the Court’s decision in that case.... All the police had to go on in this case was the bare report of an unknown, unaccountable informant who neither explained how he kriew about the gun nor supplied any basis for believing he had inside information about J.L. If White was a close case on the reliability of anonymous tips, this one surely falls on the other side of the line.
J.L., 529 U.S. at 271, 120 S.Ct. at 1379. Indeed, the Supreme Court engaged in an extended discussion of the anonymous informant’s reliability in J.L. precisely because the tip disclosed criminal conduct and might have supported a detention if the informant was proved to be reliable. See Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S. 143, 146-47, 92 S.Ct. 1921, 1923-24, 32 L.Ed.2d 612 (1972).
Although all nine justices joined the J.L. opinion, see 529 U.S. at 274, 120 S.Ct. at 1380 (Kennedy, J., and Rehnquist, C.J., concurring, and noting “I join in the opinion in all respects”), the concurring opinion also refutes the interpretation the majority opinion in this case gives to J.L. Specifically, the concurring opinion posits as follows:
An anonymous telephone tip without more is different, however, for even if the officer’s testimony about receipt of the tip is found credible, there is a second layer of inquiry respecting the reliability of the informant that cannot be pursued. If the telephone call is truly anonymous, the informant has not placed his credibility at risk and can lie with impunity. The reviewing court cannot judge the credibility of the informant and the risk of fabrication becomes unacceptable.
On this record, then, the Court is correct in holding that the telephone tip did not justify the arresting officer’s immediate stop and frisk of respondent. There was testi*655mony that an anonymous tip came in by a telephone call and nothing more. The record does 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 prosecution recounted just the tip itself and the later verification of the presence of the three young men in the circumstances the Court describes.
529 U.S. at 275, 120 S.Ct. at 1381.
Rarely are the facts of two cases as congruent as the facts in J.L. and this case. As in J.L., the officer in this case received information from his dispatcher concerning a report from an anonymous person. As in J.L., the testimony indicates an anonymous informant said that a man brandished a firearm in a public place. See 529 U.S. at 268, 120 S.Ct. at 1377 (noting that an anonymous caller reported that a young man “was carrying a gun”). As in J.L., the testimony indicates the anonymous informant described the gender, race, and location of the accused. As in J.L., the officer did not see a gun before detaining the man. Finally, as in J.L., the circumstances surrounding the anonymous informant’s tip were not sufficient to negate the substantial risk of fabrication.
The similarities between J.L. and this case extend beyond the basic facts. Indeed, the two cases present the same Fourth Amendment concerns that troubled the Supreme Court. As in J.L., the officers’ suspicion that Jackson was unlawfully carrying a weapon arose solely from a call made from an unknown location by an unknown caller. “Unlike a tip from a known informant whose reputation can be assessed and who can be held responsible if her allegations turn out to be fabricated, ... ‘an anonymous tip alone seldom demonstrates the informant’s basis of knowledge or veracity.’ ” 529 U.S. at 270, 120 S.Ct. at 1378 (citation omitted).
The notion that the police could “infer that [the tip] ... came from a concerned citizen making a contemporaneous, eyewitness report” merely because the tip alleges “an open and obvious crime” is precisely the type of analysis that J.L. rejects. Nothing about such a tip provides a basis upon which *656anyone might conclude that the anonymous informant is either honest or providing reliable information. A plain reading of J.L. discloses that the Supreme Court, in a footnote, summarily disposed of the thesis advanced by the majority opinion in this case when the Court ruled that “[t]he mere fact that a tip, if true, would describe illegal activity does not mean that the police may make a Terry stop without meeting the reliability requirement.” J.L., 529 U.S. at 273 n. *, 120 S.Ct. at 1380 n. *. As in J.L., the tip in the present case lacks indicia of reliability.
The majority in this case accepts the Commonwealth’s suggestion to disregard J.L. and to rely on this Court’s decision in Scott v. Commonwealth, 20 Va.App. 725, 460 S.E.2d 610 (1995), to create some type of exception for guns. I believe that decision is not supportable. First, Scott was, in my view, wrongly decided, see 20 Va.App. at 730-32, 460 S.E.2d at 613-14 (Benton, J., dissenting and noting that “(t]he record in this case contains no basis upon which anyone could have determined that the invisible, unknown informant was reliable or had a basis to know anything other than the presence of the defendant, or someone similarly dressed, in the laundromat”). Second, Scott was decided in 1995, five years before its similar facts were presented to the Supreme Court in J.L. Third, in cases involving the application of constitutional principles, the Supremacy Clause, U.S. Const. Art. VI, cl. 2, does not allow state court decisions to trump decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Reynoldsville Casket Co. v. Hyde, 514 U.S. 749, 750-51, 115 S.Ct. 1745, 1747-48, 131 L.Ed.2d 820 (1995); Harper v. Virginia Dep’t of Taxation, 509 U.S. 86, 100, 113 S.Ct. 2510, 2519, 125 L.Ed.2d 74 (1993); Kesler v. Department of Public Safety, 369 U.S. 153, 172, 82 S.Ct. 807, 818, 7 L.Ed.2d 641 (1962).
I would also note that the Commonwealth pursued, and the Supreme Court of Virginia rejected, an argument similar to that advanced in this case. See Harris v. Commonwealth, 262 Va. 407, 551 S.E.2d 606 (2001). There, as here, “the Commonwealth does not expressly concede the applicability of the holding in J.L. to the facts of this case.” Id. at 414, 551 S.E.2d at 609. There, as here, the Commonwealth argued *657that the anonymous informant’s tip about a gun provided a heightened justification to support a detention. Id. at 416, 551 S.E.2d at 611. Rejecting this Court’s decision that the officer could use the tip as a basis for conducting a frisk for the officer’s safety, see Harris v. Commonwealth, 33 Va.App. 325, 334, 533 S.E.2d 18, 22 (2000), the Supreme Court reversed the conviction. The Court noted that the officer’s detention of Harris was contrary to the ruling in J.L. and rejected the Commonwealth’s argument as one that “bootstraps the legitimate concern for law enforcement officers’ safety, which permits a protective search of a legally detained suspect, to serve as the basis for detaining the suspect.” Harris, 262 Va. at 416, 551 S.E.2d at 611.
The United States Supreme Court specifically rejected the type of firearm exception that the Commonwealth argued in Harris and in this case and that the majority opinion now resurrects from Scott. The Court unambiguously held as follows:
[A]n automatic firearm exception to our established reliability analysis would rove too far. Such an exception would enable any person seeking to harass another to set in motion an intrusive, embarrassing police search of the targeted person simply by placing an anonymous call falsely reporting the target’s unlawful carriage of a gun____ If police officers may properly conduct Terry frisks on the basis of bare-boned tips about guns, it would be reasonable to maintain under the above-cited decisions that the police should similarly have discretion to frisk based on bare-boned tips about narcotics. As we clarified when we made indicia of reliability critical in Adams and White, the Fourth Amendment is not so easily satisfied.
J.L., 529 U.S. at 272-73, 120 S.Ct. at 1378-80 (citations omitted). These principles are equally applicable to a circumstance in which an anonymous informant says he observed the commission of an “open and obvious illegality.” Even in that circumstance, “[i]f the telephone call is truly anonymous, the informant has not placed his credibility at risk and can lie with impunity.” Id. at 275, 120 S.Ct. at 1381 (Kennedy, J., and *658Rehnquist, C.J., concurring). In the absence of a “verifiable explanation of how the informant came to know of the information in the tip,” Ramey v. Commonwealth, 35 Va.App. 624, 631, 547 S.E.2d 519, 523 (2001), there still remains “a second layer of inquiry respecting the reliability of the informant that cannot be pursued.” J.L., 529 U.S. at 275, 120 S.Ct. at 1381 (Kennedy, J., and Rehnquist, C.J., concurring).
The Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Commonwealth’s “imminent danger” exception for firearms, and the Court “demand[s]” an “indicia of reliability ... for a report of a person carrying a firearm.” Id. at 274, 120 S.Ct. at 1380 (emphasis added). Because this case is clearly controlled by the Supreme Court’s decision in J.L., I would reverse the conviction. Therefore, I dissent.