Spinelli v. United States

Mb. Justice Harlan delivered the opinion of the Court.

William Spinelli was convicted under 18 U. S. C. i 1952[1] of traveling to St. Louis, Missouri, from a nearby Illinois suburb with the intention of conducting gambling activities proscribed by Missouri law. See Mo. Rev. Stat. § 563.360 (1959). At every appropriate stage in the proceedings in the lower courts, the petitioner challenged the constitutionality of the warrant which authorized the FBI search that uncovered the evidence necessary for his conviction. At each stage, Spinelli’s challenge was treated in a different way. At a pretrial suppression hearing, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri held that Spinelli [*412] lacked standing to raise a Fourth Amendment objection. A unanimous panel of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit rejected the District Court’s ground, a majority holding further that the warrant was issued without probable cause. After an en banc rehearing, the Court of Appeals sustained the warrant and affirmed the conviction by a vote of six to two. 382 F. 2d 871. Both the majority and dissenting en banc opinions reflect a most conscientious effort to apply the principles we announced in Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U. S. 108 (1964), to a factual situation whose basic characteristics have not been at all uncommon in recent search warrant cases. Believing it desirable that the principles of Aguilar should be further explicated, we granted certiorari, 390 U. S. 942, our writ being later limited to the question of the constitutional validity of the search and seizure.[2] 391 U. S. 933. For reasons that follow we reverse.

In Aguilar, a search warrant had issued upon an affidavit of police officers who swore only that they had “received reliable information from a credible person and do believe” that narcotics were being illegally stored on the described premises. While recognizing that the constitutional requirement of probable cause can be satisfied by hearsay information, this Court held the [*413] affidavit inadequate for two reasons. First, the application failed to set forth any of the “underlying circumstances” necessary to enable the magistrate independently to judge of the validity of the informant’s conclusion that the narcotics were where he said they were. Second, the affiant-officers did not attempt to support their claim that their informant was “ 'credible’ or his information 'reliable.’ ” The Government is, however, quite right in saying that the FBI affidavit in the present case is more ample than that in Aguilar. Not only does it contain a report from an anonymous informant, but it also contains a report of an independent FBI investigation which is said to corroborate the informant’s tip. We are, then, required to delineate the manner in which Aguilar’s two-pronged test should be applied in these circumstances.