Anonymous Tips

Court decisions have varied as to the reliance that they allow police officers to place on anonymous informants in attempting to establish reasonable suspicion or probable cause for arrests or search warrants, as required by the Fourth Amendment.

Prior to 1983, the Court had limited use of such evidence. Thus, in Giordenello v. United States (1958), the Court disallowed evidence secured from a warrant based on a general statement that an officer “believes that [there] are witnesses in relation to this charge.” Draper v. United States (1959) did allow an officer to arrest and search a defendant on the basis of a tip from an informant previously known to be reliable, reasoning that in addition to the informant indicating the suspect would be carrying drugs when disembarking a train, the suspect's physical behavior had provided further clues to his possible wrongdoing. In Aguilar v. Texas (1964), the Court refused to allow conclusionary evidence that “[a]ffiants have received reliable information from a credible [but unnamed] person” of drug offenses; in Recznik v. City of Lorain (1968), the Court refused to accept that information from persons who had stopped police officers in the street provided probable cause for the officers to enter an apartment that the officers believed to be a gambling establishment; and in Spinelli v. United States (1969), the Court invalidated the use of evidence from an informant whose past reliability had not been verified. The Court thus formulated the two-part Aguilar-Spinelli test, which required that police provide magistrates with evidence that showed that an informant was reliable and credible as well as some of the underlying circumstances being relied upon to establish the informant's credibility. United States v. Rowell, 612 F.2d 1176 (7th Cir. 1980), provides an example of a case in which the Court upheld the use of such evidence.

In Illinois v. Gates (1983), the Court replaced the Aguilar-Spinelli test with a more flexible, “totality of the circumstances” test. It allowed police to use evidence they had secured from an anonymous informant about a couple dealing drugs that gave particulars of their travel plans from Illinois to Florida and back but that gave no particular evidence indicating how, other than hearsay, the informant knew about the couple's drug dealing. In Alabama v. White (1990), the Court further allowed a police officer to rely on information from what he claimed had been an anonymous phone call to make an arrest that revealed drug possession. Because the defendant in this case had a broken headlight and because she had consented to a search of her handbag that revealed drugs, it is possible that police could have proceeded with the stop and arrest without direct reliance on this tip.

Florida v. J. L. (2000) seems in part to have resurrected the Aguilar-Spinelli test by disallowing evidence from an anonymous caller that led police to frisk a male and discover a [Page 89]gun, because the evidence had offered no predictive evidence of criminal behavior. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed on behalf of a unanimous Court that “[i]f the telephone call is truly anonymous, the informant has not placed his credibility at risk, and can lie with impunity. The reviewing court cannot judge the credibility of the informant and the risk of fabrication becomes unacceptable.” In so ruling, the Court refused to carve out a special “firearms exception” to general rules.

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