State v. Simpson

968 S.W.2d 776, 1998 Tenn. LEXIS 71, 1998 WL 70389
CourtTennessee Supreme Court
DecidedFebruary 23, 1998
Docket02S01-9702-CC-00010
StatusPublished
Cited by263 cases

This text of 968 S.W.2d 776 (State v. Simpson) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Tennessee Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Simpson, 968 S.W.2d 776, 1998 Tenn. LEXIS 71, 1998 WL 70389 (Tenn. 1998).

Opinions

OPINION

DROWOTA, Justice.

Based on a confidential informant’s tip, police stopped the defendant’s veMcle. A consensual search of her person revealed drugs. The issue in this appeal is whether the tip, as corroborated by independent police work, exMbited sufficient indicia of reliability to satisfy the two-pronged1 constitutional test of reliability and provide reasonable suspicion to justify the investigatory stop. We hold that it did and therefore affirm the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeals upholding the trial court’s deMal of the defendant’s motion to suppress.

FACTUAL BACKGROUND

Testifying at the suppression hearing in this case, Officer Rodney Weaver of the McNairy County Sheriff’s Department and Drug Task Force said that he received a call from a confidential informant at approximately 3:30 p.m. on December 30,1994, that the defendant, Grapel Simpson, and another person, Jimmy Brumley,2 were transporting 100 dilaudid pills from MempMs to McNairy County. The informant related that the defendant and Brumley were traveling from MempMs on Highway 64 in a two-door, cream or beige colored Oldsmobile and would arrive in Selmer “any minute.” The informant did not state wMch of the two would be driving the veMcle. Though he did not explicitly say that the informant previously had given information resulting in arrests and convictions, Officer Weaver said he knew the informant “through previous contacts as a confidential informant.” Officer Weaver acknowledged that the informant previously had been convicted of a felony, but said that [778]*778he considered the information reliable, related it to MeNairy County Sheriff Paul Ervin, and proceeded to Highway 64.

Sheriff Ervin arrived first at Highway 64 and identified Brumley and the defendant coming in from the west in the vehicle described by the informant. Based upon the tip and his corroboration of it, Sheriff Ervin stopped the vehicle. Officer Weaver arrived about three minutes thereafter and questioned separately the defendant and her companion. Each claimed that they were returning from Memphis, but they gave inconsistent responses about the purpose of the trip. The defendant told Officer Weaver that they had taken her niece back to Memphis, while Brumley said they had driven to Memphis alone. Officer Weaver then told the defendant that they had information she was transporting illegal drugs, to which the defendant replied, “Well, you can look. You can search. I don’t have anything.” Brum-ley, who had been driving the car, also consented to the search. The officers proceeded to search the ear, but the search revealed nothing.

Officer Weaver then asked the defendant if she had any drugs on her person. Simpson responded, “No. You can look all you want.” Officer Weaver replied ‘Well, you don’t mind us looking then, if you hadn’t got anything to hide,” and the defendant replied ‘Yeah, sure.” Ruth Travis, a female dispatcher, who previously had been summoned to the scene arrived less than five minutes later. Travis, the director and dispatcher of E-911, previously had been employed by the Sheriffs Department and had conducted body searches on other occasions. Travis escorted the defendant to an area behind a patrol car which had been parked on the opposite side of the highway. The defendant removed her coat and Travis placed it in the seat of the patrol car. Travis proceeded to search the defendant’s person. Eventually, claiming that she was cold, the defendant reached for her coat. When Travis told the defendant that she would first have to search the coat before the defendant could put it on, the defendant told Travis that there were drugs in the pocket of the coat. The defendant offered to pay Travis if she would not tell the other officers about the drugs. Travis seized the coat and called for Officer Weaver. One hundred dilaudid pills were discovered in the defendant’s coat pocket.

The defendant also testified at the suppression hearing and denied giving the officers permission to search either her car3 or her person. She also denied offering to pay Travis to keep quiet about the drugs, and said the reason she had told Travis about the drugs was to avoid having to remove her clothing while standing alongside the highway on a cold day with four or five male officers on the other side of the road.

Based upon the proof summarized above, the trial court denied the defendant’s motion to suppress finding “that sufficient probable cause supported the initial stop of the vehicle in which the defendant was a passenger.” By denying the motion to suppress, the trial court implicitly rejected the defendant’s claim that she did not consent to the search of her person or vehicle.4 Upon the trial court’s denial of her motion to suppress, the defendant pled guilty to possession of dilau-did, a Schedule II drug, with intent to deliver and sell, but reserved the right to appeal as a certified question of law the denial of her motion to suppress.5 See, Tenn. R.Crim. P. 37(b)(2).

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the trial court’s denial of the motion to sup[779]*779press, finding the confidential informant’s tip, along with the police corroboration, sufficiently reliable to satisfy the two-pronged test and establish reasonable suspicion to render the stop valid under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). In addition, the Court of Criminal Appeals found that the defendant voluntarily consented to the search of both her vehicle and her person. Thereafter, we granted the defendant permission to appeal, and for the reasons that follow, now affirm the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeals.

STANDARD OF REVIEW

In resolving the issues in this appeal, we review the trial court’s findings as follows:

Questions of credibility of the witnesses, the weight and value of the evidence, and resolution of conflicts in the evidence are matters entrusted to the trial judge as the trier of fact. The party prevailing in the trial court is entitled to the strongest legitimate view of the evidence adduced at the suppression hearing as well as all reasonable and legitimate inferences that may be drawn from that evidence. So long as the greater weight of the evidence supports the trial court’s findings, those findings shall be upheld. In other words, a trial court’s findings of fact in a suppression hearing will be upheld unless the evidence preponderates otherwise.

State v. Odom, 928 S.W.2d 18, 23 (Tenn.1996). The application of the law to the facts found by the trial court, however, is a question of law which this Court reviews de novo. State v. Yeargan, 958 S.W.2d 626, 629 (Tenn.1997).

CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE STOP

A. Informant’s Tip/Reasonable Suspicion

In this Court, the defendant contends that the confidential informant’s tip did not demonstrate the informant’s veracity or basis of knowledge as required by this Court’s decisions in State v. Jacumin, 778 S.W.2d 430 (Tenn.1989) and State v. Pulley, 863 S.W.2d 29 (Tenn.1993).

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
968 S.W.2d 776, 1998 Tenn. LEXIS 71, 1998 WL 70389, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-simpson-tenn-1998.