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Police must have more than anonymous tips

The Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled police must corroborate anonymous tips before officers stop and frisk someone.  

The unanimous ruling came Thursday in a case involving a man convicted of being a felon in possession of a handgun and having a firearm while intoxicated.  The court threw out the convictions because they were the result of an anonymous report made to police in May 2009.  The opinion says law enforcement had no grounds to stop and frisk the man because there was no indication, beyond the anonymous report, that a crime had been committed. As a result, the court ruled evidence against Williamson should have been suppressed.

Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.
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