Naked City

On May 8 Texas' 3rd Court of Appeals reversed and remanded to district court the case of a juvenile found with marijuana near Travis High School, in a case that further defines when police can conduct "routine" pat-down searches. "The officer must be able to articulate specific facts giving rise to a reasonable suspicion," the judges wrote, "that a person might be armed and dangerous or involved in illegal activity; an inchoate hunch is not enough."

According to the opinion, AISD Police School Resource Officer Joe Chavez was stationed at Travis last January when he got a call from an anonymous tipster that three high school-aged kids were standing behind a nearby business smoking pot. One of the three, the tipster told Chavez, was a black male wearing a Deion Sanders football jersey. After walking through the school parking lot, Chavez spotted one black male wearing a Sanders jersey; Chavez approached the boy (referred to in court documents only by the initials A.T.H.), who, he reportedly told the trial court, was cooperative, giving both his name and birth date.

Chavez said that although the boy did look to be the right age, Chavez did not recognize him as a Travis student, and informed A.T.H. that he was going to do a "pat-down" search, "for his safety and my safety." According to Chavez, before he began his pat down, A.T.H. reached into his pocket, withdrawing a baggie of pot he then attempted to conceal within his hands. A.T.H. was subsequently charged with possession of marijuana within 1,000 feet of a school.

The boy's lawyer, Ambrosio Silva with the Travis Co. Juvenile Defender's Office, sought to suppress the pot evidence because the anonymous tip did not imbue Chavez with concrete "reasonable suspicion" to search the boy. The trial court disagreed; the law has long held that an anonymous tip is enough to create reasonable suspicion for teachers or administrators, the latter broadly defined to include campus police. But justices Lee Yeakel, David Puryear, and Jan Patterson ruled that the pat-down was indeed an illegal search -- and, as Silva sees it, the justices have raised the bar on all administrators. "An anonymous tip doesn't rise to the level of reasonable suspicion, even for a school administrator," he said. "That's how I read it."

The justices opined that Chavez had no reason to suspect A.T.H. was a threat and that the tipster's accurate description of the boy did not "show that the tipster has knowledge of concealed criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion ... requires that a tip be reliable in its assertion of illegality, not just in its tendency to identify a determinate person." Thus, "Chavez's pat-down was not justified," and "the marijuana was the fruit of an illegal detention and should be suppressed."