Com. v. Canavan

• Decision Date: 03 July 1996
• Docket Number: No. 95-P-306,95-P-306
• Citation: 40 Mass.App.Ct. 642,667 N.E.2d 264
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Richard J. CANAVAN.
• Court: Appeals Court of Massachusetts

Page 264

667 N.E.2d 264

40 Mass.App.Ct. 642

COMMONWEALTH v. Richard J. CANAVAN.

No. 95-P-306.

Appeals Court of Massachusetts,

Norfolk.

Argued March 8, 1996.

Decided July 3, 1996.

Leon A. Geller, Boston, for defendant.

Robert C. Cosgrove, Assistant District Attorney, for Commonwealth.

Before ARMSTRONG, KAPLAN and GILLERMAN, JJ.

KAPLAN, Justice.

The defendant appeals from a judgment of conviction, after nonjury trial, of operating a motor vehicle while under the influence, second offense (G.L. c. 90, § 24). The conviction was consequent upon the refusal of a District Court judge to suppress evidence secured by the Commonwealth as the result of a police stop of the defendant's vehicle amounting, according to the defendant, to an illegal seizure. If the defendant's contention succeeds, the conviction fails, as nothing of moment was added by the trial proper.

1. To summarize the testimony of Foxborough Officer Joseph McDonald, the only witness at the suppression hearing. In the early morning, January 10, 1993, McDonald, in a marked cruiser, was doing building-security patrol in the vicinity of the rotary in central Foxborough. Six streets merge into the rotary. About 1:15 A.M. McDonald, driving northward toward the rotary on Central Street, one of these feeder streets, noticed a car (the defendant's) motionless, facing southward, near the point where Central Street meets the rotary. The defendant remained in this position for up to three minutes. He was looking around. McDonald circled the rotary to go to the rear of the defendant's car. The defendant moved very slowly and entered Central Street headed southward, at about fifteen miles per hour. (The speed limit there is twenty miles per hour; farther down the street it increases to forty miles per hour.) McDonald followed. The defendant turned a corner west onto Bassett Street, a side street, but McDonald continued on Central Street halting with his lights on at a closed Mobil gas station. Evidently the defendant took a further turn on Bassett Street and reentered Central Street through Clark Street, another side street. The defendant drove into the Mobil station near McDonald. There was no conversation between the two. The defendant left the Mobil station and drove down Central Street toward the rotary. McDonald got behind the defendant. Before the defendant reached the rotary, McDonald pulled him over by activating his lights and blasting his siren.

The defendant had not committed any traffic or vehicle violation, he had not crossed the center line or "weaved," his lights were on, he was going fifteen miles per hour in a twenty-mile-per-hour zone. McDonald made the stop because he believed the defendant was lost: the rotary was confusing, and he had seen the defendant's pause at the rotary and his reversal of direction on Central Street at the Mobil station. ¹

After the stop, McDonald asked the defendant for his license and registration. The defendant complied. McDonald asked the defendant whether he was lost. The defendant answered, "No." Now McDonald detected a strong odor of alcohol emanating from the defendant and observed in plain view an empty case of beer and an empty half-pint bottle of peppermint schnapps. The officer arrested the defendant on the drunken driving charge. ²

2. The question on the motion to suppress was "whether a police officer may stop a motorist for reasons unrelated to any law enforcement or regulatory purpose, but solely to be of assistance to the driver," more particularly when "the police officer believe[s] the motorist [is] lost." Thus, United States District Judge (as he then was) Jon O Newman formulated the issue, which was of first impression at the time, in United States v. Dunbar, 470 F.Supp. 704, 705 (D.Conn.), aff'd, 610 F.2d 807 (2d Cir.1979). ³ The question is the same in the present case, and the facts in the two cases are not different in essence. In Dunbar, a Connecticut State Trooper, stopped in his vehicle at 1:00 A.M. at an intersection near the Rhode Island border, observed a car with Rhode Island plates moving at slow speed. The driver showed uncertainty in selecting the road and made what the trooper took to be a wrong turn. The trooper was confirmed in his belief that the driver was lost, as others in the trooper's experience had been at this location. Having pulled behind the car, the trooper turned on his blue flashing lights to signal the driver to stop. Approaching the driver, the trooper asked for his license and registration. The driver produced the papers and acknowledged he was lost. The stop led to the discovery of a large knife in plain view on the front seat of the car, for which the driver was arrested on the spot (possession of a dangerous weapon in a motor vehicle), and to the finding of an object the officer suspected to be a bomb on the rear floor of the car and, in the trunk, of materials for making bombs; as to these, the driver was later indicted for possession of an unregistered destructive device in violation of Federal statute.

The situation presented itself to the trooper as one where he must decide whether the artillery of a moving-vehicle stop was the right way to confront this citizen who might be lost. Legal analysis joins with common perceptions to suggest an answer. The lawfulness of the stop, Judge Newman said, was submissible to the tests of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution although the stop was made for a benign purpose: under Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 653, 99 S.Ct. 1391, 1396, 59 L.Ed.2d 660 (1979), "stopping an automobile and detaining its occupants constitute a 'seizure' within the meaning of [the Fourth and Fourteenth] Amendments, even though the purpose of the stop is limited and the resulting detention quite brief." Was the seizure "unreasonable" and forbidden by the Fourth Amendment? This "depends on a balance between the public interest and the individual's right to personal security free from arbitrary interference by law officers" as suggested in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 878, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 2579, 45 L.Ed.2d 607 (1975). The weights on the sides of the balance are hard to measure. The Supreme Court recognized in Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 441, 93 S.Ct. 2523, 2528, 37 L.Ed.2d 706 (1973), that police officers may intrude to some extent on the individual's privacy when they perform "community caretaking functions" unrelated to crime-detection or regulatory purposes. And it is undeniable that the rendering of assistance to a motorist in that caretaking mode can in some situations justify motor vehicle stops--Judge Newman illustrates the point with a case where the police stop a motorist to inform him that a bridge beyond a bend in the road has washed away, or a case where a road remains passable but the police promote safety by stopping the motorist to inform him about road hazards. United States v. Dunbar, 470 F.Supp. at 707.

Centering, however, on the situation of the lost motorist, Judge Newman holds that the governmental safety interest in aiding the motorist is not substantial and entitled to "extremely slight weight" in the Fourth Amendment balance. Moreover, this interest, such as it is, may "be as well served by having the police officer make his presence known and leaving to the motorist the decision as to whether to stop and seek directions." Id. at 707. On the side of the individual, the interest is also not weighty, for the intrusion on privacy is "brief and normally uneventful," ibid.; yet "it does entail the risk of creating 'substantial anxiety,' Delaware v. Prouse, [440 U.S. at 657, 99 S.Ct. at 1398], and is a selective stopping that is viewed by the Supreme Court as more intrusive than a stopping of all motorists at a given point" (citations omitted). 470 F.Supp. at 707.

With the balance thus even or nearly so, Judge Newman was persuaded by two considerations that it should be struck on the side of privacy. First, "[t]he policy of the Fourth Amendment is to minimize governmental confrontations with the individual," and this is not promoted by permitting the police to stop nonoffending citizens simply to give them directions. And second, "the risk of abuse is real" as we see in the abuse of the "plain view" principle. "The Fourth Amendment stands against initiating a new line of cases in which the officer says, 'I thought he was lost.' " Id. at 708. ⁴

Be it noted that the Dunbar reasoning does not invite an undue invasion of the Fourth Amendment into the community caretaking functions of the police: the multitudinous everyday contacts between police officers and individuals do not approach any need for forcible intrusions on privacy. On the other hand, Dunbar does not inhibit the police from making intrusions amounting to seizures when the governmental interest predominates--thus seizure even of lost motorists is justified when safety hazards are actually entailed and lights and sirens are needed to arouse the attention of the drivers and avoid mishap. Just so, Professor LaFave records his approval of the Dunbar decision and distinguishes a case, State v. Oxley, 127 N.H. 407, 503 A.2d 756 (1985), where in the particular situation seizure was justified to prevent endangering other drivers. 4 LaFave, Search and Seizure § 9.2(b), at 26-28 (3d ed. 1996). ⁵

3. Understood as just indicated, the Dunbar decision would, we think, be generally accepted as sound. So a reading of opinions around the country, including those citing Dunbar, would suggest. ⁶ We believe, too, that our precedents in Massachusetts are compatible with a holding that rejects seizure and its consequences in any lost-motorist case free of complicating elements (safety hazards, illness, suspicion of crime, or the like). Compare Commonwealth v. Silva, 366 Mass. 402, 405-407, 318 N.E.2d 895 (1974); Commonwealth v. King, 389 Mass. 233, 241-42, 449 N.E.2d 1217 (1983); Commonwealth v. Helme, 399 Mass. 298, 300-302, ...