Aguilar v. Texas and Gates v. Illinois were cases that featured decisions made by the United States Supreme Court concerning the basement of the search warrants on the evidence provided by anonymous informants. The affidavits relied on the information that was presented in the form of unsigned letters, and both defendants were convicted for drug possession. However, the Supreme Court’s requirements for testing the validity of the evidence were not congruent: the major diversion point was the reliability of the source of information used in the process of the investigation.
In the Aguilar v. Texas case, two officers asked for a search warrant providing an affidavit that allocated their acquisition of relevant piece of information from a trustworthy source that assured them of the presence of illegal substances at the petitioner’s residence. The convicted made an objection towards, as it was put, evidence acquired in the process of execution of the search warrant. However, the Supreme Court overruled this objection and stated that the evidence could be acquired through hearsay information. Nevertheless, the information and the informant were bound to be checked with respect to accuracy and completeness. Thus, the main requirement for the information was that the court should be aware of the reasons the informant availed the data, and the affiant considered it consistent. (Justia, n.d.). For that purpose, five years later, a test was developed that provided the guidelines for the verification. To pass the test, the informant should a) be honest, and b) have a trustworthy source of their information (Kinports, 2014).
In the Gates v. Illinois case, the police also received a letter informing that a married couple made a living by trading substances and kept them in their residence. Some additional information was obtained by Detective Mader, who decided to rely on the letter. The affidavit by Mader featured the data collected by the anonymous informant and the Detective himself, upon which the search warrant was issued. It was agreed that the letter alone could not be a sufficient source of information, but it was a part of a set of issues that could determine the probable cause (Moore, 1983). The Supreme Court, therefore, deviated from using the Aguilar-Spinelli test to probate the evidence, instead adopting a “totality of circumstances” approach that relied on the corroborated details and was not “reduced to a neat set of legal rules” (Kinports, 2014).
Thus, the main difference in the requirements was that, in the Aguilar case, the informant was the main source and therefore had to be reliable, and in Gates case the informant’s tip could be complemented by the results of the police’s investigation. In contrast to the “totality of circumstances approach” deployed in the Gates v. Illinois case, the Aguilar v. Texas case requirements contributed to the investigation since they assured the search warrant was issued relying on a trustworthy source. Additional information corroborating the evidence was considered secondary since it fell under the exclusionary rules without the good faith exception. On the other hand, the Gates v. Illinois case developed an approach that required the consideration of all information that could cause suspicion. It was asserted that the insufficiency of one assumption can be compensated for by the relevance of another one, provided that it was acquired as a result of innocent activity.
References
Justia. (n.d.). Aguilar v. Texas 378 U.S. 108 (1964). Web.
Kinports, Kit. (2014). Probable Cause and Reasonable Suspicion: Totality Tests or Rigid Rules?University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online, 163(75), 75-87. Web.
Moore, C. E. (1983). Fourth Amendment – Totality of the Circumstances Approach to Probable Cause Based on Informant’s Tips. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 74(4), 1249-1264.