FindLaw > Criminal Law Summaries > Florida v. J.L

Case: Florida v. J.L

Issue: Is an anonymous verified tip, that a person located at a particular place and wearing a particular piece of clothing is carrying a gun, sufficient, without more, to justify a police officer's stop and frisk of that person?

Facts: The police received an anonymous phone tip stating only that a young black male wearing a plaid shirt and standing at a particular bus stop was carrying a gun. The call was not recorded and nothing was known about the informant. The two responding officers found three black males at the bus stop, one of whom, J.L., wore a plaid shirt. Aside from the matching description, the officers had no reason to suspect illegal conduct. One officer told J.L. to put his hands up, frisked him, and seized a gun from his pocket. J.L. "was charged . . . with carrying a concealed firearm without a license and possessing a firearm while under the age of 18." He moved to suppress the gun, because it was allegedly the fruit of an unlawful search -- that is, the officer's stop and frisk. The trial court granted the motion to suppress. An intermediate state appellate court reversed, "but the Supreme Court of Florida quashed that decision and held the search invalid under the Fourth Amendment."

Holding: "[A]n anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun is, without more, [insufficient] to justify a police officer's stop and frisk of that person."

Reasoning: Justice Ginsburg, writing for a unanimous Court, noted that the Court’s starting point for stop and frisk analysis is still  Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 30 (1968) which held:

[W]here a police officer observes unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous, where in the course of investigating this behavior he identifies himself as a policeman and makes reasonable inquiries, and where nothing in the initial stages of the encounter serves to dispel his reasonable fear for his own or others’ safety, he is entitled for the protection of himself and others in the area to conduct a carefully limited search of the outer clothing of such persons in an attempt to discover weapons which might be used to assault him.

Here, however, the officers' suspicion that J.L. was carrying a gun did not arise from their own observations, but rather "solely from a call made from an unknown location by an unknown caller." When an officer's suspicion is based, not on his own observations, but on a tip, it is that tip (and any corroboration of that tip) that must provide the basis for a reasonable belief that criminal activity may occur. At this point, the veracity of the informant and the basis of his knowledge become crucial in determining whether or not a Terry stop is justified. When the tip is from a known informant, his "reputation can be assessed" and he "can be held responsible" if his allegations are fabricated. When, as in this case, the informant remains anonymous, the tip alone "seldom demonstrates the informant's basis of knowledge or veracity." Though anonymous tips may provide information describing a subject that aids police in correctly identifying that person, such information does not, by itself, justify a search. Instead, searches need to be justified by information that suggests the informant "has knowledge of concealed criminal activity." This is the type of information the Court considers adequate to provide "sufficient indicia of reliability" to make an investigatory stop. Thus, the Court has recognized in the past that "there are situations in which an anonymous tip, suitably corroborated, exhibits sufficient indicia of reliability to provide reasonable suspicion to make the investigatory stop." In  Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325 (1990), for example, the Court upheld a Terry stop based on police corroboration of an anonymous tip that "a woman was carrying cocaine and predicting that she would leave an apartment building at a specified time, get into a car matching a particular description, and drive to a named motel." Only after the police corroborated the informant's predictions was it reasonable to conclude that "the tipster had inside knowledge about the suspect and therefore to credit his assertion about the cocaine." White was a "close case," but this one "surely falls on the other side of the line." The tip about J.L. "lacked the moderate indicia of reliability present in White and essential to the Court's decision in that case. The anonymous call concerning J.L. provided no predictive information and therefore left the police without means to test the informant's knowledge or credibility."

The Court also explained that it is unwilling to make a firearm exception to Terry stop requirements that would allow a stop and frisk for guns on the basis of "bare-boned tips about guns." Such an exception would "swallow the rule" and "enable any person seeking to harass another to set in motion an intrusive, embarrassing police search…simply by placing an anonymous call." The Terry rule, permitting protective limited police searches based on reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, is itself a Fourth Amendment exception based on the extraordinary dangers posed by firearms. Finally, the Court noted that its decision does not speak to cases in which "the danger alleged in an anonymous tip (for example, that a person is carrying a bomb) might be so great as to justify a search even without a showing of reliability," or to cases involving public safety officials, in areas such as airports, where diminished privacy expectations might justify a Terry stop "on the basis of information insufficient to justify searches elsewhere."

Other Opinions: Justice Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, filed a concurring opinion agreeing with the Court’s decision "in all respects." Nonetheless, Kennedy added that "there are many indicia of reliability respecting anonymous tips that we have yet to explore in our cases." These may include an anonymous tip from a repeat informant (recognized by voice) who has proven reliable in the past or a tip given face-to-face to an officer by an informant in a car that the officer can later describe. Finally, the concurrence noted that the wide availability of instant caller identification or voice recording which could be used to locate an anonymous informant "may be a factor which lends reliability to what, years earlier, might have been considered unreliable anonymous tips."

Comment: The Court stressed that its opinion only related to the "stop" element in "stop and frisk" cases, and that officers remain free under Terry to conduct protective searches of persons who have been legitimately stopped.