MA: Informant wasn’t supported for patdown

A defendant told he’s going to be frisked is “seized.” Here, the record is devoid of any factual justification for the frisk based on what “other people” said. If they were informants, there was no showing of basis of knowledge or any reason to be truthful. Commonwealth v. Arias, 81 Mass. App. Ct. 342, 963 N.E.2d 100 (2012)*:

Here, the record reveals nothing about the informants’ basis of knowledge or veracity. Hart and Halloran, the MBTA employees who told the police about the defendant, expressly stated that they were passing on information they had obtained from “other people” but said nothing about who the other people were and provided no information about the other people that would enable anyone to determine either their veracity or basis of knowledge. In that regard, we treat the individuals who gave information to Hart and Halloran as unknown informants even though police knew their identities by the time of the hearing. … Nothing in the record suggests that the police knew who the informants were before they arrested the defendant or that they had any idea how the informants knew of the gun. Moreover, information obtained from known informants receives somewhat greater weight than that received from anonymous informants because known informants expose themselves to “charge[s] of filing a false report or any comparable consequence of providing false information to law enforcement.” Commonwealth v. Mubdi, 456 Mass. 385, 397, 923 N.E.2d 1004 (2010). See Commonwealth v. Costa, 448 Mass. 510, 515-517, 862 N.E.2d 371 (2007). Here, the informants faced no such consequences when they made their disclosures to Hart or Halloran. Indeed, nothing in the record suggests that they even knew that Hart or Halloran would relay their information to authorities.