Supreme Court Declines to Hear Appeal in Anonymous DUI Tip Case

Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court John Roberts thinks states that don’t allow police to stop drivers based on anonymous tips are endangering the public, but the court as a whole did not agree to hear a case that would have challenged some lower court rulings on this matter.This lets the ruling stand in a Virginia DUI case that was thrown out due to the police stop being based solely on an anonymous call. According to this report, four states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Wyoming and Virginia have court rulings that don’t allow police to pull people over based exclusively on anonymous reports of swerving or dangerous driving.

And while Justice Roberts derisively calls this the “one free swerve rule”, meaning after receiving an anonymous tip, the police must follow and observe a driver doing something on the road that indicates dangerous or impaired driving. But is that really such a tough standard?

If the driver appears to be traveling safely, not swerving, and obeying all traffic laws, then what is the real danger?

The other question not answered is, why are all these tipsters anonymous? If you see someone driving dangerously, why exactly would you be unwilling to leave your name? A tip by an actual verifiable witness makes it a perfectly legal stop in all of these cases.

I understand that many people don’t want to get involved in police matters, or risk having to spend the time actually testifying in court as witnesses. But only a small percentage of drunk driving cases actually end up going to trial.

The vast majority end up pleading guilty, often due to tough DMV rules suspending drivers licenses for DUI suspects. People often plead guilty in marginally cases for the simple reason that they can get their driver’s license back more quickly. A criminal record its an acceptable trade if the alternative is losing your job and your home. For these reasons, the likelihood of being required to actually testify in a drunk driving case is not very high.

There is a strong case to be made that allowing anonymous tips to be a legitimate basis for police to stop a car is unconstitutional. It is not hard to imagine police using “anonymous tip” as a blanket excuse to pull over anyone they want.

But on the conservative Roberts court, it’s arguable that he and Scalia were looking for an excuse to challenge the four holdout states that take a more aggressive defense of civil liberties and against government and police authoritarian power.

UPDATE: The New American lays out some additional details from the original Virginia decision that are interesting. According to this report, the anonymous tip that was called in included the driver’s name, and shirt color. The Virginia Chief Justice, in his ruling, stated that the tipster did not actually provide any specific reason why he thought the defendant might be drunk or driving dangerously. The Justice went on to add that the information provided could have come from someone with the grudge against the defendant, and does not provide articulable suspicion on it’s own.

It seems to me that these stops based on anonymous tips are similar to police in stop and frisk cases. If you believe that government or police involvement in your business should always be restricted and limited to explicit and narrow suspicion that you are breaking the law, then you are probably against anonymous tip based stops and stop and frisk.

If you take a broader view of police responsibility of public safety that justifies sometimes aggressive intrusion, then you probably support these policies.

About David Matson