holding officers did not have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity when they “encountered three men that they did not know, in a place where people are permitted to be, doing something completely in line with the expected activity at the location, at a time when people might be expected to be found there”
How later courts described this case
- holding officers did not have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity when they “encountered three men that they did not know, in a place where people are permitted to be, doing something completely in line with the expected activity at the location, at a time when people might be expected to be found there”
- holding that direct review of the denial of a motion to suppress is proper only when the defendant files an interlocutory appeal, so an appeal on this issue following trial is best framed as a challenge to the admission of the evidence at trial
- explaining that fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine applies to “evidence obtained pursuant to an unlawful seizure” and extends to “derivative evidence” that “has been come at by exploitation of that illegality”
- finding the encounter between police and defendant moved from a consensual encounter to a seizure when the officer “required the men to sit on the ground so he could respond more quickly to their movements—once he employed his authority to control and restrict their freedom to depart—the encounter moved past what would be considered ‘consensual’”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
MASSA, Justice,
dissenting.
The Court’s thoughtful and meticulous parsing of the facts and the law, in the end, leaves one overarching question unanswered: what should the pólice have done?
When called at midnight to a 24-hour storage facility in a high-crime area to help the owner evict a customer improperly living in a unit, should they have refused to come? I doubt it. Once there, should they have declined to investigate further and not accompanied the owner from the gate to the unit? Again, I think not. Most critically, once they entered the unit and saw Clark drop his bag, should they have looked the other way and departed?
The breadth of the Court’s opinion notwithstanding, the issue essentially boils down to whether the officers had a reasonable and articulable suspicion that justifies their decision to conduct a Terry stop. Once they saw Clark drop his bag, I would conclude they did have such a suspicion, whatever the tone of their ensuing instructions. It was Clark’s subsequent admission, as the majority notes, that led to his arrest and all that followed — most of which this Court would approve, had it not found all that fruit poisoned for want of Terry suspicion.
*274 I would affirm the trial court as a unanimous panel of the Court of Appeals did below and thus respectfully dissent.