Ohio OVI Law; State v. Reed (tipster reliability)

State v. Reed, 2010-Ohio-299 (OH2)

Reed was arrested at approximately 12:45a.m. on February22, 2009, by Kettering Police Officers Schomburg and Woolf. Officer Schomburg testified that he and Officer Woolf were both in a UDF store on Stroop Road, in Kettering, and that: “We were just standing there talking, having a cup of, cup of hot chocolate; and then Patricia Wolfe, who’s a clerk at UDF she came running toward us and said that the defendant just bought some alcohol, bought some beer, and when he was leaving, he was stumbling, and he had a very, very strong odor of alcohol. She said that he was, he was drunk.  Subsequently the officers made contact with Reed and arrested him on various charges. Following an unsuccessful Motion to Suppress, this matter was appealed to the Second District Court of Appeals.

The 2nd District found that the clerk or “tipster” was sufficiently reliable to justify stopping the vehicle, holding: “Patricia Wolfe’s (the clerk) tip was both credible and sufficient to give rise to a reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior that justified the investigative stop of Defendant. The officers did not act on a mere inchoate hunch, as Defendant contends. Defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were not violated by his stop.”  The case goes on to give a detailed analysis of the burden placed on the State to secure admissibility of the Standardized Field Sobriety Tests.