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DC: CI's handler necessary witness at suppression hearing to show PC

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

At the suppression hearing, the CI’s handler has to testify to what the CI knew so the search does not become merely ratified by the officer’s conclusion that the CI was believable. Here, just the officer conducting the search based on another officer’s relaying of information from the CI was the only witness. Parsons v. United States, 2011 D.C. App. LEXIS 139 (March 17, 2011): The problem in the present case is that, even applying the collective knowledge doctrine, there was no testimony from which the trial court could have judged the informant’s credibility. Detective Humberson was not the confidential informant’s handler; in fact he had never dealt with the informant prior to the day of Parsons’s arrest...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on March 21, 2011 (boomark / email).