Com. v. Santana

• Decision Date: 04 August 1988
• Citation: 526 N.E.2d 1051,403 Mass. 167
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Angel V. SANTANA.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

Page 1051

526 N.E.2d 1051

403 Mass. 167

COMMONWEALTH v. Angel V. SANTANA.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts,

Suffolk.

Argued April 5, 1988.

Decided Aug. 4, 1988.

Kevin J. Ross, Asst. Dist. Atty., for Com.

Ronald Ian Segal, Everett, for defendant.

Before HENNESSEY, C.J., and WILKINS, LIACOS, ABRAMS and LYNCH, O'CONNOR, JJ.

ABRAMS, Justice.

A judge in the Superior Court allowed the defendant's motion to suppress evidence obtained from a search of the defendant's person. The Commonwealth sought an interlocutory appeal. Mass.R.Crim.P. 15(b)(2), 378 Mass. 884 (1979). We reverse the order allowing the defendant's motion to suppress.

We summarize the facts as found by the motion judge. At approximately 10 P.M., on June 11, 1986, Detective Eduardo Dominguez received a telephone call at Boston police headquarters from an informant. Dominguez, who was assigned to the drug control unit, had received information from this individual on approximately thirty prior occasions and the informant's tips had led to arrests and convictions of individuals trafficking in cocaine.

The informant told Detective Dominguez that an unnamed Hispanic male with dark hair and a moustache, wearing a red T-shirt and black pants and carrying a brown bag would be arriving in Boston on the 11 P.M. Greyhound bus from New York City. The informant stated that the man would be carrying cocaine. Acting on this information, Detective Dominguez and three other officers proceeded to the Greyhound terminal where they set up a surveillance.

The bus from New York arrived at 11:05 P.M. Dominguez saw the defendant, who fit the informant's description, disembark from the bus. The defendant entered the terminal and made a telephone call from a public telephone. The defendant was in the terminal approximately eight or nine minutes. The defendant then left the terminal and hailed a taxicab.

As the defendant was about to enter the cab, Detective Dominguez arrested him. Dominguez opened the defendant's bag and found forty foil packages containing powdered cocaine, a plastic bag containing rock cocaine, and a substance frequently used to cut cocaine. The defendant filed a motion to suppress the evidence seized from his bag. The Superior Court judge allowed the motion.

After the judge allowed the defendant's motion to suppress, the Commonwealth sought an interlocutory appeal. See Mass.R.Crim.P. 15(b)(2). In seeking its appeal, the Commonwealth failed to file a notice of appeal in the Superior Court, see Mass. R.A.P. 3(a), as amended, 378 Mass. 927 (1978), prior to filing its application before the single justice. As a result, the defendant filed a motion to dismiss the application as untimely filed. See Commonwealth v. Bouvier, 399 Mass. 1002, 1003, 504 N.E.2d 355 (1987). Following oral argument, the single justice allowed the Commonwealth's application and transferred the case to the Appeals Court. The defendant filed a notice of appeal in the county court challenging the propriety of the order of the single justice, alleging again that the Commonwealth's appeal was untimely filed. Thereafter, the single justice allowed a motion by the Commonwealth, unopposed by the defendant, to transfer the case from the Appeals Court to this court to be heard together with the other cases raising the same issue that we decide today.

We discuss first the defendant's argument that the Commonwealth's failure to file a notice of appeal in the Superior Court requires the present appeal to be dismissed. The Commonwealth ordinarily must file a timely notice of appeal under rule 3(a) in order to perfect an interlocutory appeal in a criminal case. Bouvier, supra. The defendant clearly raised this point at the hearing on the Commonwealth's application, and the single justice expressly stated in his order that he allowed the Commonwealth's application, "[u]pon consideration of counsels' argument...." Thus, implicit in the order of the single justice is the exercise of his authority to "suspend the requirements or provisions of any of these rules in a particular case on application of a party or on [his] own motion and ... order proceedings in accordance with [his] direction." Mass.R.A.P. 2, 365 Mass. 845 (1974).

Although the better practice would have been for the single justice expressly to permit the Commonwealth to file a notice of appeal (subject to the time limit in Mass.R.A.P. 14[b], as amended, 378 Mass. 939 [1979] ), ¹ and to condition his allowance of the application on the Commonwealth's filing a proper notice in the Superior Court, we decline to rule that the procedure he selected in this case requires dismissal of the appeal. ² The single justice expressly ordered "that the Clerk of the Superior Court Department of the Trial Court for the County of Suffolk assemble the record in [this case] and transmit the record to the Appeals Court of the Commonwealth for determination by that court." In the circumstances of this case, we conclude that the single justice's order, which was filed in the Superior Court the day after its issuance, served the purpose of a rule 3(a) notice of appeal. We therefore proceed to the merits.

The issue on appeal is whether there was probable cause to support the defendant's arrest and the search of his bag. As we concluded in Commonwealth v. Robinson, 403 Mass. 163, 526 N.E.2d 778 (1988), an arrest and search comports with the due process requirements of art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights if the information known to the police at the time of the arrest satisfies the two-pronged test of Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U.S. 108, 84 S.Ct. 1509, 12 L.Ed.2d 723 (1964), and Spinelli v....