Com. v. Farrow
| Decision Date | 04 August 1988 |
| Citation | 403 Mass. 176,526 N.E.2d 1048 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH v. James FARROW. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
Bruce R. Bono, Committee for Public Counsel Services, for defendant.
Kevin J. Ross, Asst. Dist. Atty., for Com.
Before HENNESSEY, C.J., and WILKINS, LIACOS, ABRAMS, NOLAN, LYNCH and O'CONNOR, JJ.
The defendant appeals from the denial of his motion to suppress evidence seized pursuant to a warrantless search of his person. The defendant applied, pursuant to Mass.R.Crim.P. 15(b)(2), 378 Mass. 884 (1979), to a single justice of this court for leave to appeal the denial of the motion to suppress. The single justice allowed the application and reported the case to this court. We affirm.
We summarize the relevant facts. On June 29, 1986, at about 7:30 P.M., Detective Robert Tully of the drug control unit of the Boston police department received a telephone call from an informant who had provided him with reliable information over the previous several months. Tully had never personally found the informant's information to be incorrect. The informant had told Tully, on several occasions, of drugs transported to Boston from out-of-town locations. The informant's tips had led to the arrest and conviction of four individuals and two other cases were pending before the courts.
The informant told Tully that a bearded black male in his late twenties, approximately six feet tall and weighing 160 to 170 pounds would be arriving that evening at 19A West Dedham Street in the South End section of Boston at about 8 P.M. The informant stated that the man would be dressed in gray pants and a gray checkered shirt, and would be carrying a large amount of narcotics.
Tully and other officers of the drug control unit decided to set up a surveillance at both 19A West Dedham Street and the Greyhound bus terminal, because the officers' past experience indicated that the individual might be arriving in Boston at the bus terminal, a known center of drug importation. At about 8:15 P.M., Tully received a radio communication from the officers at the bus terminal who stated that they thought they had seen a person matching the description given by the informant enter a taxicab. Minutes later, a taxicab stopped across the street from the West Dedham Street address, followed by the police cruiser that had been stationed at the bus terminal. Tully saw the defendant get out of the cab. Tully approached him, stopped him, and patted him down. Tully recovered a large bag of cocaine and a number of glassine bags from the paper bag. He recovered more glassine bags from the defendant's crotch area....
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...See Commonwealth v. Robinson, 403 Mass. at 165-166; Commonwealth v. Santana, 403 Mass. 167, 168, 171 (1988); Commonwealth v. Farrow, 403 Mass. 176, 177-178 (1988). Compare Commonwealth v. Brown, 31 Mass. App. Ct. 574, 577 (1994). The initial informant proved to have firsthand knowledge of t......
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...judge that the independent police corroboration of the tip in this case was at least as extensive as that in Commonwealth v. Farrow, 403 Mass. 176, 178, 526 N.E.2d 1048 (1988). Here, in a short time, as predicted by the informant, a large black man whom police knew to be "Gene" Washington, ......
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