March 28, 2000 -- Court Cuts Police Power To Search
Washington, DC -- A Supreme Court ruling has sharply curtailed police power to rely on anonymous tips to stop and search people, the Associated Press reported.
According to the AP, the Court said that Miami police acted unlawfully when in 1995 they searched and arrested a juvenile for carrying a gun based on an anonymous telephone call saying someone matching the youth’s description had a concealed weapon.
``The question is whether an anonymous tip ... is ... sufficient to justify a police officer's stop and frisk,'' Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the Court. ``We hold that it is not.''
She said such ``bare-bone tips'' generally do not give police the reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct needed to justify the type of stop-and-frisk search the nation's highest court has allowed for the last 32 years.
The Court's unanimity caught some legal experts by surprise. Over the past two decades, a series of conservative-led rulings have dramatically narrowed protections offered by the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable police searches and seizures.
``This was a slam-dunk victory for individual rights,'' said James Tomkovicz, a University of Iowa law professor who represented the ACLU and other groups in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.
``The Court made clear it is not going to sacrifice personal privacy whenever the magic word 'firearm' is mentioned,'' he said. ``That message was made even more emphatic by the fact the Court was unanimous.''
The liberal groups had attracted an unlikely ally -- the National Rifle Association, whose friend-of-the-court brief had urged the Justices to protect ``the peaceful carrying of a firearm.''
But the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, Robert Scully, said, ``We are disappointed and, frankly, baffled by the Court's decision.'' He added, “We fear that more officers and more members of the public will be assaulted and murdered.''
In the Miami case, a youth was arrested as a result of an anonymous tip that three black youths were standing outside a pawn shop and that the one in a plaid shirt was carrying a gun.
The Court ruled that the search violated the young man’s Fourth Amendment rights and, as a result, the seized gun could not be used as evidence against him. The decision upheld a Florida Supreme Court ruling that had suppressed use of the gun as evidence.
Source: Associated Press, March 28, 2000
