{"id":5250,"date":"2011-05-02T10:13:27","date_gmt":"2011-03-06T00:25:31","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-05T11:54:36","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=5250","title":{"rendered":"DC: One witness with hearsay did not prove exigency for hot pursuit entry for robber; had to be “trustworthy hearsay”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reliance on one witness hearsay to prove exigency for hot pursuit of an armed robber was insufficient. In re K.H.<\/a>, 14 A.3d 1087 (D.C. 2011):<\/p>\n

… Thus, although the District claims the police did not need a warrant to enter apartment three because they were in hot pursuit of an armed robber, it still bore the burden of proving the police had probable cause to believe the robber had entered that apartment minutes earlier.<\/p>\n

In our view, the District did not carry that burden. Instead of offering the testimony of one of the officers who entered apartment three in pursuit of the fleeing robber, it relied exclusively on the hearsay testimony of Detective Thompson, a witness who possessed no personal knowledge of the entry. Trustworthy<\/em> hearsay is admissible in a suppression hearing and may justify a finding of probable cause. However, Detective Thompson’s testimony was, on the essential point, too unreliable and uncertain to support such a finding. The detective could say only that it was his \u201cunderstanding\u201d the officers entered apartment three because they overheard \u201csome talk [inside the apartment] about the police being outside\u201d and some \u201cmention of someone going to run or something like that.\u201d The deficiencies in this testimony are glaring. Detective Thompson never identified the source (or sources) of his \u201cunderstanding\u201d; it is impossible to know whether the detective spoke to anyone with personal knowledge of what the police overheard or whether his account involved multiple levels of hearsay. Without such knowledge, one cannot reasonably conclude that the detective\u2019s \u201cunderstanding\u201d of what the police heard was reliable. Moreover, and critically, Detective Thompson admittedly could not provide even a reasonably accurate account of what the police professed to have heard. What he reported was vague and unenlightening. By itself, the information that someone in apartment three said police were outside and \u201csomething about running\u201d does not demonstrate that an officer of \u201creasonable caution\u201d would have been warranted in believing the robber had gone into the apartment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}