State v. Talbott
| Decision Date | 29 December 1982 |
| Docket Number | No. 81-2271,81-2271 |
| Parties | STATE of Florida, Appellant, v. Charles TALBOTT and Steve Jesmer, Appellees. |
| Court | Florida District Court of Appeals |
Jim Smith, Atty. Gen., Tallahassee, and Trela J. White and Stewart J. Bellus, Asst. Attys. Gen., West Palm Beach, for appellant.
Richard L. Jorandby, Public Defender, and Richard B. Greene, Asst. Public Defender, West Palm Beach, for appellees.
This is an appeal by the state from an order suppressing evidence obtained as a result of an alleged illegal arrest. We reverse.
The facts are not in dispute. Joseph Jesmer and Ernest Holland, after being arrested, told police that they had heard Jesmer's brother Steve planning a bank robbery. The robbery was to occur within the week in Palm Beach County at a bank on Military Trail between Hypoluxo Road and Purdy Lane. Steve and a friend, Charles Talbott, were to use a pistol, wear ski masks, escape in a black Mustang and leave the state immediately thereafter. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department immediately sent this information to banks in the target area. One week later, no bank having been robbed, the police again questioned Joseph Jesmer, who had subsequently been released. He told them that the black Mustang was under repair and that he did not know if the robbery was still under consideration.
Approximately three weeks after the original tip, a teller at a bank in the target area reported a robbery similar in detail to the one anticipated by the police. Later that day, detectives stopped the black Mustang and took Jesmer and Talbott into custody. Jesmer and Talbott then confessed to unrelated crimes while denying their involvement in the bank robbery. In fact, it turned out that the bank had not been robbed. Rather, the teller had embezzled the funds and concocted the robbery story based on the information concerning the anticipated robbery by Jesmer and Talbott circulated earlier by the Sheriff's Department. The trial court suppressed the confessions on the grounds that the police did not have probable cause to arrest Jesmer and Talbott. The trial court was particularly concerned with the police officer's reliance on the information provided by Joseph Jesmer and Ernest Holland.
A police officer may arrest a suspect without a warrant outside the suspect's home if the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect has committed a felony. An informant's tip may provide probable cause if it satisfies a two part test. The tip must reveal the basis for the informant's knowledge and it must be sufficiently truthful. The veracity may be proven by the informant's credibility or the intrinsic reliability of the information he provides. Barfield v. State, 396 So.2d 793 (Fla. 1st DCA 1981); Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U.S. 108, 84 S.Ct. 1509, 12 L.Ed.2d 723 (1964); Spinelli v. United States, 393 U.S. 410, 89 S.Ct. 584, 21 L.Ed.2d 637 (1969).
The basis-of-knowledge part of the test is satisfied if the information is based on personal observation or if it is received from reliable and credible third parties. Barfield, at 795. In this case, the information provided by Joseph Jesmer and Ernest Holland was based upon an overheard conversation. Such a basis is equivalent to personal observation. Thus, the state satisfied this part of the test.
To satisfy the veracity part of the test, the state must show the informant's credibility or the information's reliability. In this case, for instance, it appears that the state failed to establish the credibility of the informants to the extent necessary to rely on that tip alone for making an arrest. 1
Importantly, however, information may also be proven reliable if, when considered along with a police officer's corroboration of the information by independent investigations, it may be judged to be "as trustworthy as a tip which would pass Aguilar's test without independent corroboration." Spinelli, at 415, 89 S.Ct. at 588. In other words, if there is reliable independent evidence available to the police that supports the tip, that evidence itself may be sufficient to establish the reliability of the tip. For such corroboration by independent investigation to be sufficient, it does not have to supply probable cause itself, but it must at least be "unusual in inviting explanation." LaFave, Probable Cause From Informants: The Effects of Murphy's Law on Fourth Amendment Adjudication, 1977 U. of Ill.L.Forum 1,55 quoted in Barfield, at 797. 2
In our view, the reliability of the information provided by the informants was sufficiently established here when the police received an independent report of a bank robbery, the description of which fit almost exactly the earlier report of the...
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