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VA: Recitation of CI's performance in the past was too general, and only innocent details were corroborated

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

CI provided information resulting in a dozen other search warrants, but the officers provided nothing to tell the issuing magistrate whether they led to convictions or about the quantity and quality of the cases. What corroboration there was here was of innocent details, and that was not enough. Byrd v. Commonwealth, 2010 Va. App. LEXIS 89 (March 9, 2010): This case is similar to Byrd in that the CI does not have such an unusual history of reliability that it compensates for his failure to set forth the basis of his knowledge for the information he relayed to Canada. The record in this case shows that the CI provided information to the police that led to "over twelve search warrants, seizures of large quantities of money, drugs, firearms, people with arrest warrants," yet it does not inform as to how many of those search warrants led to actual seizure of evidence or whether the information led to convictions...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on March 16, 2010 (boomark / email).