The officers’ claimed reasonable suspicion of street drug deals in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District just doesn’t add up to it on the totality of circumstances. The CI wasn’t adequately corroborated. The stop and frisk fails. United States v. Castaneda, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20252 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 7, 2019)*:
After evaluating the totality of the circumstances and applying the legal framework set forth above, the Court concludes that the officers lacked reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk Castaneda. Although the government asserts that the high-crime location and Castaneda’s “evasive” behavior supported reasonable suspicion, the majority of the government’s argument hinges on the reliability of the tip. However, the tip provided by the group of men lacked the indicia of reliability necessary to support the Terry stop. Citing Palos-Marquez, the government emphasizes that the tip was provided in-person and that the tip was made “nearly contemporaneously” with the precipitating event. The in-person nature of the tip does, under Palos-Marquez, weigh somewhat in favor of its reliability. However, Officer Ruetti states in his declaration that he “recognize[d] some of the men in the reporting group from prior police contacts in the Tenderloin. In particular, I had previously suspected one of the reporting men of being involved in drug distribution in the Tenderloin.” Ruetti Decl. ¶ 6. Thus, the reporting men consisted of (1) some men Officer Ruetti did not recognize; (2) some men Officer Ruetti recognized from “prior police contacts”; and (3) a suspected drug dealer. The reporting men had no track record of reliability, and to the contrary, a tip provided by a combination of unknown individuals and persons who were known to Officer Ruetti through prior “police contacts” should have been considered with some degree of skepticism. Unlike the tipsters in Rowland and Palos-Marquez who did not have an apparent motive to lie, the tipsters here — a group of men who included a suspected drug dealer and others known through “police contacts” – may very well have had a motive to lie about other individuals or a group of alleged “gangsters.” Further, while the witnesses’ “frantic” demeanor could be considered as bolstering the reliability of the tip, the fact that the entire tipster group of men immediately and closely followed Officer Ruetti up Hyde Street toward the first group of men further undercuts the reliability of the tip. Cf. Rowland, 464 F.3d at 908 (“The informant in this case provided sufficient detail to dispel concerns that the tip was a hoax.”); see also White, 496 U.S. at 333 (Stewart, J., dissenting) (expressing concern that if a generalized tip is sufficient to create reasonable suspicion, “[a]nybody with enough knowledge about a given person to make her the target of a prank, or to harbor a grudge against her, will certainly be able to formulate a tip about her”).
In addition, the tip utterly lacked detail and did not contain any predictive information that could be verified by the police. Unlike the tips in Rowland or Palos-Marquez, which contained specific identifying information about a particular person or vehicle, here the tipsters did not provide a name or a specific description of any individual who allegedly had a gun, nor did the tipsters provide any other details regarding the event giving rise to the tip. Officer Ruetti’s declaration states that the reporting men were “primarily Hispanic and speaking in broken English” and that neither he nor Officer Daggs spoke Spanish. …
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
