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njlauren -> RE: R.I.P. 4th Amendment (4/24/2014 8:56:40 PM)
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The whole issue of probable cause is a tough one, precisely because it can be abused, it can be used for fishing expeditions and worse. When cops get a warrant, they have to show cause to a judge why they want the warrant, and they have to mention specifically what they are looking for and where they will look. If they are looking for a stolen car, they cannot look in drawers in your house and find a stash of drugs, if they did so, the evidence would be tainted.
Yet with probably cause, they have a lot more leeway. Leaving this particular case aside, a cop sees someone with a broken taillight, pulls them over, decides the driver is acting suspiciously, and can search the car, and finds a knife in the car, the guy can be arrested, even though all he pulled him over for was a broken tail light. In some cases, people pulled over for traffic violations had the trunk searched and so forth, something illicit was found and it was upheld.....whereas if a warrant was involved, they may not have been able to search the trunk, if they specified they were seeing if the car had a stolen motor under the hood.
In this specific case what it boils down to me (and first note, the law courses I took in grad school showed why I should never be a lawyer) is whether the anonymous tip was enough to pull the guy over. The reasonable man argument says would a reasonable person see the chain that led to the arrest, an anonymous tip says the car ran them off the road, they gave an accurate description, they saw a car that matched the description, it was driving very carefully, should that have set off alarm bells? I can understand a cop putting two and two together in this case, that the guy driving too carefully meant he was hiding something, add that to the claim the guy ran someone off the road, and it becomes turn on the siren.....
My thinking on it, though, is that this did not meet the standards of probable cause, and here is why. The anonymous tip led them to the car in question, and that to me is not the real problem, the problem is that the person in question was driving perfectly legally, yet the cop pulled them over. If the driver had been weaving, if they showed some signs of aggressive driving, that combined with the tip would be good grounds to pull him over. I don't have the information on hand, but did the driver of the other car that phoned in the tip give a license plate? If they had given the plate, there is probably cause because they were searching for a specific vehicle, if the tip was broad, 'a black camaro', then the cops could in theory pull over any black Camaro on the road and claim probable cause. If the reason for looking for the car is tremendously broad, as in a tip to look for 'a black sedan' or a 'black camaro' or 'black camry', you are giving too broad permission to pull people over and find things, it would be like asking for a search warrant of the garages of every person in a 20 mile radius who owned a black camaro because someone said a hit and run driver was in a black Camaro. The overall point being is that if a tip is so broad, that it leads to a wide dragnet, then to me that tip in of itself is meaningless, unless if because of the tip the cops observed a car matching the description of the car that was driving illegally, which was not true in this case. The whole 'driving too carefully' is something that I think if someone bothered taking it to SCOTUS would be thrown out, the whole 'acting suspiciously' is so broad as to be worthless IMO.
Scalia once in a while comes down on the side of rights, and in this case, he is I think pointing out the basic principle of our laws, when it comes to basic rights, something like probably cause, when there is doubt it is supposed to come down to protecting the right of the individual over the law, if you start allowing things like "they just didn't look right", "My guy told me so", you are giving the edge to the law to pull anyone over they feel like, which is basically allowing a police state. Was the driver in question a menace? Probably, but the cop had no way of really knowing that, he couldn't pull him over because someone claimed they ran them off the road (not without witnesses), and the "he was driving too well' is ludicrous. Saying "well, by pulling him over, they may have saved lives" is the end justifying the means, it would be like saying it was okay for someone to kill another person, because the other person likely was a murderer, one doesn't justify the other. I am no bleeding heart, I find a lot of the legal fine points that get accused criminals off are absurd, but in this case allowing a private tip and 'gut feeling' to act as probably cause is a very, very slippery slope we shouldn't go down. The fact that the cop ended up getting lucky doesn't change that the procedure stank, any more then broad based search warrants that turn up real crimes are not a good thing.
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