Brooks v. State
| Decision Date | 16 May 1973 |
| Docket Number | No. 1,No. 48209,48209,1 |
| Court | Georgia Court of Appeals |
| Parties | Calvin BROOKS v. The STATE |
Syllabus by the Court
Since acts of peace officers in detaining and questioning a citizen are necessarily a curtailment of his right to go about his business unmolested, and since also investigation and questioning are necessary elements of crime prevention and detection, the exigencies of the situation as they reasonably appear at the time must dictate the extent of intrusion into constitutionally protected areas. Momentary detention and questioning are permissible if based upon specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, justify a reasonable course of inquiry not based on mere inclination, caprice, or harassment. The mere fact that a motor vehicle turns off from a main highway to a side road at night, there being no rational ground for suspicion that it is connected with any law violation, does not justify its pursuit and detention. An envelope of marijuana found on the driver's person under these circumstances should not be allowed in evidence over a proper motion to suppress.
Brooks and a woman companion, driving along a U.S. highway in a pickup truck at about 2:30 a.m. were obsderved by a sheriff and his deputy to turn onto a side road leading into a woods. They followed the car for some distance, then flashed their top light and brought it to a stop. The sheriff and the defendant got out of their respective vehicles and in the illumination of the headlights the defendant was observed to have a plastic bag sticking out of his shirt pocket in which, according to the peace officers, a green substance could be seen. The sheriff removed the bag from Brooks' pocket and arrested him for possession of marijuana. This appeal is taken from the overruling of his motion to suppress the evidence so acquired.
Cook & Palmour, A. Cecil Palmour, Summerville, for appellant.
Earl B. Self, Dist. Atty., Wm. Ralph Hill, Jr., Summerville, for appellee.
We have no difficulty in reiterating that arrest without a warrant may be made for a crime committed in the presence of the arresting officer. Code § 27-207. On the other hand we find a violation of the defendant's basic rights in the pursuit and detention here much like that detailed in Holtzendorf v. State, 125 Ga.App. 747, 188 S.E.2d 879. According to the officer who testified on the hearing of the motion, the truck was proceeding down the highway at a proper speed and unattended by any suspicious circumstances. There was a shopping center at nearby Trion, Georgia, but it neither appeared there had been any criminal activity there or that the occupants of the vehicle had been in its vicinity. The side road, so far as appears from the record, was a public road. It is by no means the only road in the area leading into or through a woods, and the witness had no explanation as to why he should follow the car except that he 'suspected he might be up to something that's no good.' Our decision in Holtzendorf was to some extent founded on Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889, where it was pointed out that whenever a police officer accosts an individual and restrains his freedom to walk away, that person has in a sense been seized. Terry, supra, left open detailed analysis of the subtle difference between a stop and an arrest, or a frisk and a search, as not necessary to the questions there considered, while recognizing that there is an intermediate ground for police activity although no probable cause for arrest or search without a warrant exists. We recognized the same thing in Anderson v....
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