Ames v. State

• Decision Date: 03 September 1999
• Docket Number: No. 98-2577.,98-2577.
• Citation: 739 So.2d 699
• Parties: Miranda Yevette AMES, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee.
• Court: Florida District Court of Appeals

739 So.2d 699

Miranda Yevette AMES, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee.

No. 98-2577.

District Court of Appeal of Florida, First District.

September 3, 1999.

Nancy A. Daniels, Public Defender and Carl S. McGinnes, Assistant Public Defender, Tallahassee, for Appellant.

Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General and Daniel A. David, Assistant Public Defender, Office of the Attorney General, Tallahassee, for Appellee.

PADOVANO, J.

Miranda Yvette Ames, the defendant, appeals her conviction for trafficking in cocaine. The sole issue on appeal is whether the trial court erred in denying the defendant's motion to suppress evidence obtained as a result of her arrest. We conclude that the defendant was arrested without probable cause and that the evidence the police obtained from her is inadmissible as a product of the unlawful arrest. Therefore, we reverse.

The cocaine that is the subject of the charge was seized in an operation the police officers described as a routine bus boarding. On July 14, 1997, Special Agent Savell of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and Detectives Nettles and Waldon of the Jacksonville Sheriffs Department boarded a bus that was about to depart from the Greyhound Bus Station in Jacksonville. When the officers stepped inside the bus, they displayed their badges and announced that they wished to see each passenger's bus ticket and personal identification. The officers stated that they were conducting a routine check and informed the passengers that they were not under arrest.

The defendant gave Detective Waldon her identification and bus ticket, which he examined and returned to her. Detective Waldon then asked the defendant if she had any carry-on luggage, and at that point she became nervous. According to the detective, the defendant's hands were shaking and she repeated the question she had just been asked. She told the detective that she did not have any carry-on bags on the bus.

Detective Waldon then turned his attention to Reginald Gwinn, the passenger seated directly in front of the defendant. Although Gwinn was able to show the detective his identification, he could not produce a bus ticket. He said that the defendant was holding his ticket but he denied that he and the defendant were traveling together. The defendant explained that Gwinn had asked her to buy his ticket for him that morning at the bus station. She told detective Waldon that she had purchased the ticket for Gwinn in her own name. Gwinn also denied having any carry-on luggage. He, like the defendant, was behaving nervously.

During this questioning, Agent Savell noticed a blue carry-on bag in the overhead compartment between defendant and Gwinn. There were some artificial roses on top of the bag. Both the defendant and Gwinn denied that the bag or the roses belonged to them. The detectives inquired of the other passengers but no one on the bus claimed ownership of the bag. Savell opened the bag and found three packages wrapped in Christmas paper. He cut the Christmas paper on one of the packages and saw that underneath the paper, the package was wrapped in duct tape. From his experience as a narcotics agent, Savell suspected that the packages contained cocaine. This suspicion later proved to be true.

Gwinn and the defendant were escorted off the bus and taken to the Drug Enforcement Administration office for questioning. Gwinn told the detectives that he knew the bag contained cocaine but that he was just the defendant's lookout. The defendant said that she did not know anything about the bag or its contents. At first she denied knowing Gwinn, but when she was shown a receipt from a Jacksonville hotel, she admitted that she had stayed with him at the hotel. The detectives asked the defendant if her fingerprints might be on any of the items in the bag, and she said that she looked in the bag shortly after she boarded the bus because she wanted to know who owned it.

While the defendant was in custody, the detectives obtained a set of her fingerprints. Subsequently, they were able to match one of the defendant's known fingerprints with a latent fingerprint on the duct tape covering one of the packages of cocaine. After the packages had been examined in the crime lab, the state filed an information charging the defendant with trafficking in cocaine in excess of four hundred grams. Gwinn was charged as a codefendant in the same information, but the trial court granted a severance of the defendants for trial.

The admissibility of the cocaine was not contested in the trial court and is not at issue here. However, the defendant moved to suppress her custodial statements and the fingerprint comparison testimony. She argued that this evidence was inadmissible, because it was obtained as a result of an unlawful arrest. The trial court denied the motion as to any statement the defendant made after her Miranda warning and as to the fingerprint evidence. Over the defendant's renewed objection at trial, the state was allowed to introduce the defendant's custodial statements in evidence and to present expert testimony that her fingerprint was on one of the packages. The jury found the defendant guilty of trafficking in cocaine in excess of four hundred grams, and the trial court sentenced her to fifteen years in the Department of Corrections. The defendant has filed a timely appeal to this court.

As a preliminary matter, we conclude that the defendant was under arrest when the officers escorted her off the bus. Because the defendant was not free to leave at that time, she was "seized" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 100 S.Ct. 1870, 64 L.Ed.2d 497 (1980). Moreover, the restraint on the defendant's liberty was not merely a brief investigative detention. When the officers removed the defendant from the bus, they intended to take her into custody for questioning.

Whether the evidence obtained from the defendant following her arrest is admissible depends on the legality of the arrest. Here, as in the trial court, the defendant challenges her arrest on the ground that it was not supported by probable cause. She accepts Agent Savell's testimony that she acted nervously and that she gave an implausible statement to explain how she came to possess Gwinn's bus ticket, but argues that these facts are not sufficient to support a finding of probable cause. We agree. Without more, an implausible statement by a nervous suspect does not amount to probable cause for an arrest.

An officer has probable cause to arrest a suspect if the facts and circumstances known to the officer would lead a prudent person to believe that an offense has been committed. See Henry v. United States, 361 U.S. 98, 80 S.Ct. 168, 4 L.Ed.2d 134 (1959). Police officers often have good reason to suspect that a crime has been committed but that is not enough to justify an arrest. As the Supreme Court explained in Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 479, 83 S.Ct. 407, 413, 9 L.Ed.2d 441, 450 (1963), "an arrest with or without a warrant must stand upon firmer ground than a mere suspicion." In the present case, the facts known by the detectives amounted to no more than a suspicion of criminal activity.

Our conclusion that the facts are not sufficient to establish probable cause for an arrest is supported by the analogous decision by the Supreme Court in Florida v. Royer, 460 U.S. 491, 103 S.Ct. 1319, 75 L.Ed.2d 229 (1983). There, law enforcement officers detained an airline passenger who was acting nervously and they...