{"id":20251,"date":"2016-01-05T07:19:50","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T12:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=20251"},"modified":"2016-01-05T07:26:48","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T12:26:48","slug":"ma-rejects-navarette-on-anonymous-911-calls-but-still-finds-reasonable-suspicion-from-observation-of-driving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=20251","title":{"rendered":"MA rejects Navarette on anonymous 911 calls but still finds reasonable suspicion from observation of driving"},"content":{"rendered":"

An anonymous 911 caller reported defendant\u2019s erratic driving, and that led to defendant\u2019s stop after the officer saw it for himself. Reliance on Navarette is rejected. \u201cWe decline to endorse the Supreme Court’s reliance on the use of the 911 system as an independent indicium of reliability for an anonymous tip. That being said, the information gleaned from the anonymous call in the present case, corroborated by other information, was sufficiently reliable to warrant a finding that the officer had reasonable suspicion to stop the defendant’s vehicle. The denial of the defendant’s motion to suppress is therefore affirmed.\u201d Commonwealth v. Depiero<\/a>, 2016 Mass. LEXIS 1 (Jan. 4, 2016):
\n<\/p>\n

The Commonwealth urges us to incorporate into our art. 14 jurisprudence the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Navarette, in which the Court, in a divided opinion, held that the use of the 911 emergency system itself is an \u201cindicator of veracity.\u201d Navarette, 134 S. Ct. at 1689. The Court’s reasoning, as noted, was grounded in technological and regulatory developments regarding the 911 emergency call system (making it easier to identify telephone numbers of callers), coupled with the fact that false tipsters are subject to prosecution. Id. at 1689-1690. Although Massachusetts also prosecutes false 911 reports, see G. L. c. 269, \u00a7 14B (a), and we have held in various contexts that a citizen informant who is identifiable is deserving of greater consideration than that of truly anonymous sources, see, e.g., Costa, 448 Mass. at 515, we are not inclined at this time to attribute veracity to all 911 callers. As the dissenting Justices in Navarette pointed out, even if the police are able to recover the telephone number and identity of 911 callers, \u201cit proves absolutely nothing \u2026 unless the anonymous caller was aware of that fact. It is the tipster’s belief in anonymity, not its reality, that will control his behavior.\u201d Navarette, 134 S. Ct. at 1694 (Scalia, J., dissenting). We agree.<\/p>\n

The caller in this case was aware that his call was being recorded; there is no way to know, however, based on the record before us, whether the caller had reason to believe that he might be identified or that the telephone that he was using might be traced back to him, such that it could affect his behavior or the veracity of the information he provided.5 See Anderson, 461 Mass. at 622, quoting Mubdi, 456 Mass. at 397 (where no evidence presented to caller that he or she was identifiable by police, there is \u201cno reason to believe the caller needed to fear he or she would be subject to a charge of filing a false report or any comparable consequence of providing false information to law enforcement\u201d). Contrast Costa, 448 Mass. at 517 (\u201cBy providing information to the police after knowing that her call was being recorded, and that the number she was calling from had been identified, \u2026 the caller placed her anonymity sufficiently at risk such that her reliability should have been accorded greater weight than that of an anonymous informant\u201d). We therefore decline to credit any indicia of reliability to the unidentified caller’s information merely because the information was transmitted in the form of a 911 telephone call.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An anonymous 911 caller reported defendant\u2019s erratic driving, and that led to defendant\u2019s stop after the officer saw it for himself. Reliance on Navarette is rejected. \u201cWe decline to endorse the Supreme Court’s reliance on the use of the 911 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-informant-hearsay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20251"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20254,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20251\/revisions\/20254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}