United States v. Steven Linwood Robinson

536 F.2d 1298, 1976 U.S. App. LEXIS 8508

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Decided: June 16, 1976
• Docket: 75-3727
• Status: Published

Opinions

OPINION

Before HUFSTEDLER and CHOY, Circuit Judges, and SMITH,* District Judge.

HUFSTEDLER, Circuit Judge:

This appeal presents the question: Can founded suspicion, unlike probable cause, be based solely on the receipt by the stopping officer of a radio dispatch to stop the described vehicle, without any proof of the factual foundation for the relayed message? We hold that it cannot.

Robinson appeals from his conviction for interstate transportation of a stolen motor vehicle in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2312. The district court denied his motion to suppress evidence obtained after the vehicle that Robinson was driving was stopped by Officer Holland, a state police officer. Robinson claimed that the evidence was the fruit of a stop that was not justified by founded suspicion and thus was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

On the evening of September 25, 1975, Officer Holland received a radio message from the Kingman, Arizona police dispatcher advising him to be on the lookout for a possible stolen 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass, Nevada license CKC 434. Officer Holland testified that at the time he received the message, he believed that the dispatcher had obtained some information from an inspector at the Agricultural Inspection Station located at the Nevada-Arizona border. The Government did not call either the dispatcher or the inspector to testify. Officer Holland knew nothing more about the information upon which the dispatcher relied, and he knew none of the facts upon which the inspector relied to transmit the message. Based solely on the dispatcher’s report, and not upon any observations of his own to justify the stop, Officer Holland saw the described vehicle and stopped it. Robinson was unable to produce his driver’s license or the vehicle registration. A search of the automobile followed, during the course of which a bill of lading was discovered showing that the automobile had been shipped to a dealer in Las Vegas. The speedometer registered the exact mileage between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Kingman, Arizona. Officer Holland arrested Robinson for driving without a license. While Robinson was in custody, after effectively waiving his Miranda rights, he confessed the theft and the interstate transportation of the automobile. Robinson moved to suppress all of the evidence obtained after the stop as fruit of the illegal stop. Because we agree that the stop was illegal, the evidence should have been suppressed.

As the Supreme Court stated in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975) 422 U.S. 873, 878, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 2578, 45 L.Ed.2d 486:

“The Fourth Amendment applies to all seizures of the person, including seizures that involve only a brief detention short of traditional arrest. Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U.S. 721, 89 S.Ct. 1394, 22 L.Ed.2d 676 (1969); Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 16-19, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 1877, 20 L.Ed.2d 899 (1968).”

The stop violated the Fourth Amendment unless specific articulable facts, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warranted a founded suspicion that Robinson was engaged in criminal activity. (E. g., Terry v. Ohio, supra, 392 U.S. at 21, 88 S.Ct. 1868; United States v. Mallides (9th Cir. 1973) 473 F.2d 859, 861.)

Officer Holland had no personal knowledge of any facts upon which to found suspicion. The foundation, if any, had to be supplied by the person whose observations and information generated the suspicion. The dispatch to Officer Holland, standing alone, does not prove the existence of founded suspicion. A facially valid direction from one officer to another to stop a person or a vehicle insulates the complying officer from assuming personal responsibility or liability for his act done in obedience to the direction. But the direction does not itself supply legal cause for the detention, any more than the fact of detention supplies its own justification.

We recognize that effective law enforcement cannot be conducted unless police officers can act on directions and information transmitted by one officer to another and that officers, who must often act swiftly, cannot be expected to cross-examine their fellow officers about the foundation for the transmitted information. The fact that an officer does not have to have personal knowledge of the evidence supplying good cause for a stop before he can obey a direction to detain a person or a vehicle does not mean that the Government need not produce evidence at trial showing good cause to legitimate the detention when the legality of the stop is challenged. If the dispatcher himself had had founded suspicion, or if he had relied on information from a reliable informant who supplied him with adequate facts to establish founded suspicion, the dispatcher could properly have delegated the stopping function to Officer Holland. But if the dispatcher did not have such cause, he could not create justification simply by relaying a direction to a fellow officer to make the stop.

The Government’s argument that effective law enforcement requires us to validate stops made in response to calls from fellow law enforcement officers, without any proof at trial that a factual foundation existed to support the call, was made and firmly rejected in Whiteley v. Warden (1970) 401 U.S. 560, 91 S.Ct. 1031, 28 L.Ed.2d 306. Whiteley involved probable cause, rather than founded suspicion, but we perceive no substantive difference between the two doctrines that would warrant a different result.

Reversed.