Court Opinion

ID: 9665011
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 00:36:18.975633+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:12.125851
License: Public Domain

*422GALBREATH, Judge
(dissenting).
I must respectfully dissent. To do otherwise would encourage, as I believe the majority opinion will, the indiscriminate and wholesale rounding up by the police of classes or groups of people that may fit vague, uncertain, general descriptions given by a victim of a personal crime. The defendant, William Louis Greer, was arrested solely because of a description of one of the bandits in the case given by the victim and acted upon by Lt. J. M. Dunigan of the Memphis Police Department. This description was in the officer’s words, “male, colored, 23 years old, six foot, 180 pounds, medium brown complexion, wearing sun glasses.” It later developed from testimony of the State’s witnesses that Greer, at least at the trial, weighed between 200 and 220 pounds. So, a most important part of the description, one that the average person can usually estimate rather accurately, was erroneous. Of course, the defendant could have gained a great deal of weight, but if he had, this does not appear in the record.
The description given by the victim was so general that it could have fit hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men in the Memphis metropolitan area of almost a million people with a Negro population of hundreds of thousands. The officer himself said that the sun glasses was the particular item that brought his attention to Greer as he had, coincidentally, known Greer for some time and “had never observed him when he wasn’t wearing sun glasses, day or night.”
Not only do a significant number of people, because of visual sensitivity, wear dark glasses but it is well *423known that many perpetrators of personal crimes wear such a masking device to obscure from witnesses their identity. Even more prevelant is the custom on the part of young people, particularly, of the Negro race, in this generation to wear such “shades,” as they are called, in their imitation of well known musicians and entertainment personalities, such as Ray Charles, Sammy Davis, Jr., and others whom have caused dark glasses to become a badge of the “in-crowd.”
While the fact that the bandit wore dark glasses, coupled with the fact that Greer wore dark glasses, should have afforded the officer a clue from which further investigation should have been mounted, it presented no more basis for probable cause to arrest than would have information that the robber was wearing a derby hat; perhaps not as much so as derby hats have become much rarer in our time than have sun glasses.
The anonymous telephone call referred to by Lt. Dunigan could not have been considered in the determination that he had probable cause to arrest Greer, or in this Court’s view of the legal question involved. The robbery was committed about midnight between December 19th and December 20th. The telephone call referred to by Lt. Dunigan that brought Greer to mind was received, not by him, but by someone else who told him about it on the 20th. As Lt. Dunigan phrased it in his testimony. “I did not personally receive this call. I became aware of this information on the 20th. It could have come in a day or so prior * * *” “* * * I think it possibly (sic) there was some connection with several other offenses which of course are not being brought out.” All doubt as to the insufficiency *424of the information before Lt. Dunigan must be swept away by his own testimony in which he candidly admitted he had no reasonable information on which to base an arrest. He answered in the affirmative when asked, “On this arrest * * * you were actually playing a hunch.”
I trust we have not arrived at a police state condition in which private citizens may be arrested on hunches. True, this power, if given to police, would undoubtedly solve a great many crimes. If the police in Memphis had gone out in force and arrested every Negro man that they could find who wore dark glasses, chances are they would have solved many other unconnected crimes then under investigation. The fact that this time the hunch paid off should not blind us to the fact that many such hunches would prove worthless and subject many innocent citizens to the type of harassment forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the case relied upon by the majority in upholding the reasonableness of the arrest in this case, Spinelli v. United States, 393 U.S. 410, 89 S.Ct. 584, 21 L.Ed.2d 637 (1969) the F.B.I. had the following facts upon which the Government unsuccessfully sought to base probable cause:
(1) The defendant had been shown going to and from a room in an apartment which contained two telephones listed under the name of another person. (The crime suspected was that of gambling and it is well known that a number of telephones in a single room is an essential part of the 'tools of the trade’ of the bookmaker.)
*425(2) The defendant’s car had been observed parked in the apartment’s parking lot.
(3) The F.B.I. had been informed by a reliable informant that the defendant was accepting wagering information by telephones — the particular telephones located in the apartment * * *.
(4) The defendant was known by federal and local law enforcement agents as a bookmaker * * *.
The information outlined above pointing the finger of suspicion at Spinelli was much more suggestive than was the fact that the crime before us was committed by a young Negro male wearing dark glasses and that Greer was a young Negro male who wore such glasses.
And yet the U.S. Supreme Court held:
“We conclude, then, that in the present case, the informant’s tip — even when corroborated to the extent indicated — was not sufficient to provide the basis for probable cause.”
The tip in the instant case, coming prior to the commission of the crime, and being as Officer Dunigan stated, unconnected with the crime involved in this prosecution had no more weight than the baseless hunch which caused the defendant’s arrest.
What would have been the reaction of a magistrate if an officer from the Memphis Police Department had applied for a warrant for the arrest of every Negro man in his mid-twenties in Memphis who wears dark glasses? The answer to that question will suggest graphically the *426reason why I dissent to that part of the opinion holding the validity of William Louis Greer’s arrest and the subsequent fruits deprived therefrom to be legal.
I would concur with all other parts of the opinion.