Commonwealth v. Long
| Decision Date | 17 September 2020 |
| Docket Number | SJC-12868 |
| Citation | 485 Mass. 711,152 N.E.3d 725 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH v. Edward LONG. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
John P. Warren for the defendant.
Cailin M. Campbell, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.
Rebecca Kiley, Committee for Public Counsel Services, Matthew R. Segal, Jessica Lewis, Boston, & Jessie J. Rossman, for Committee for Public Counsel Services & another, amici curiae, submitted a brief.
Oren N. Nimni, Katharine Naples-Mitchell, Chauncey B. Wood, Boston, & Radha Natarajan, for Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers & others, amici curiae, submitted a brief.
Present: Gants, C.J., Lenk, Gaziano, Lowy, Budd, Cypher, & Kafker, JJ.1
At about eleven o'clock on a November morning, two members of the Boston police department's youth violence strike force, who had been driving an unmarked vehicle, noticed a maroon Mercedes pass in front of them on a residential street. The driver was a Black man. The officers decided to query the vehicle's license plate in their onboard computer. The results returned indicated that the vehicle was registered to a Black woman and that it lacked an inspection sticker. The officers stopped the vehicle. When they learned that the driver, the defendant, had outstanding warrants and his driver's license was suspended, they searched the vehicle and found a gun in a bag on the rear passenger seat.
The defendant subsequently was charged with several firearms offenses.2 He moved to suppress the evidence seized from the vehicle, on the ground that the motor vehicle stop was the product of selective enforcement based on race, and the inventory search of the vehicle was impermissible. A Superior Court judge determined that the defendant had not met his initial burden to raise a reasonable inference that the stop had been made been motivated by race, and that the decision to impound the vehicle was reasonable in the circumstances; he therefore denied the motion. The defendant sought leave in the county court to pursue an interlocutory appeal; the single justice allowed the application and ordered the appeal to be conducted in this court.
We conclude that the Superior Court judge abused his discretion in denying the motion to suppress, because the defendant produced sufficient evidence to raise a reasonable inference that the stop was racially motivated. Nonetheless, we are persuaded that, in our efforts in Commonwealth v. Lora, 451 Mass. 425, 436-438, 886 N.E.2d 688 (2008), to ease the burden on defendants, we set the bar too high for defendants attempting to establish a reasonable inference of a discriminatory stop. In practice, providing statistical evidence sufficient to raise a reasonable inference that a motor vehicle stop was racially motivated, given the limitations of available police data, has proved infeasible for defendants. The judge's ruling well illustrates the concerns repeatedly raised about the difficulty of meeting the requirements set forth in Lora, supra at 447-449, 886 N.E.2d 688. See Commonwealth v. Buckley, 478 Mass. 861, 879-880, 90 N.E.3d 767 (2018) (Budd, J., concurring), and cases cited.
Thus, in order to ensure that drivers who are subjected to racially motivated traffic stops have a viable means by which to vindicate their rights to the equal protection of the laws, as provided by the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, we today establish a revised test. A defendant seeking to suppress evidence based on a claim that a traffic stop violated principles of equal protection bears the burden of establishing, by motion, a reasonable inference that the officer's decision to initiate the stop was motivated by race or another protected class. To raise this inference, the defendant must point to specific facts from the totality of the circumstances surrounding the stop; the inference need not be based in statistical analysis. If this inference is established, the defendant is entitled to a hearing at which the Commonwealth would have the burden of rebutting the inference. Absent a successful rebuttal, any evidence derived from the stop would be suppressed.3
1. Background. We present the facts as found by the motion judge, supplemented by uncontroverted facts from the record that the judge "explicitly or implicitly credited," reserving certain details for discussion. See
Commonwealth v. Jones-Pannell, 472 Mass. 429, 431, 35 N.E.3d 357 (2015) ().
At approximately 11 A.M. on November 28, 2017, the defendant, a young Black man, was driving a Mercedes sport utility vehicle (SUV) on a well-traveled and largely residential road in the Clam Point section of Boston. Two plainclothes officers from the Boston police department's youth violence strike force (gang unit)4 were sitting in an unmarked vehicle on a side street, where they were waiting to make a right turn onto the road on which the defendant was driving.
The defendant drove past the side street, and the officers turned onto the main road directly behind his vehicle. They did not observe a traffic violation, but one of the officers decided to enter the vehicle's license plate number into the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) database. The query revealed that the defendant's vehicle was registered to a Black woman, later identified by the defendant as his girlfriend. The query also showed that the vehicle did not have a current inspection sticker.
The officers decided to stop the vehicle on the basis of the missing inspection sticker. When the officers activated their lights and siren, the defendant pulled into a lawful parking spot on the side of the street. The officers requested his driver's license; the defendant explained that he did not have a driver's license, only a permit, which he provided the officers. Although they had never encountered each other, one of the officers recognized the defendant's name and photograph from the gang unit's database. After conducting a query of the defendant's information in the CJIS database, the officers learned that his driver's license was suspended, and that he had two default warrants for operating without a license and failure to identify himself. The officers ordered him out of the vehicle and handcuffed him.
The officers, who testified that they were aware of thefts, vandalism, and shootings in the vicinity, decided to tow and impound what they deemed to be a "high-end" vehicle, which did not belong to the defendant.5 Before towing the vehicle, one officer began to search it. During the search, he observed what he believed was the handle of a gun inside an open bag on the rear passenger seat. Once he confirmed that the object indeed was a firearm, he read the defendant the Miranda warnings and then inquired whether the defendant had a license to carry a firearm. When the defendant responded that he did not, the officers called dispatch to transport the defendant to the police station.
2. Prior proceedings. The defendant filed a motion to suppress the evidence seized from the vehicle on the ground that the stop
was impermissible because it was the result of selective enforcement of the traffic laws based on race, and the inventory search was an unlawful search for investigatory purposes, as impoundment of the vehicle was not necessary. The defendant obtained an expert in statistics (a mathematics professor who has published numerous articles and reports, and had testified previously in the Superior Court and the District Court). The expert testified at an evidentiary hearing on the motion, and introduced a report on her findings. The judge found that the datasets used by the expert were "insufficiently reliable to yield results that could raise a reasonable inference of impermissible discrimination," and denied the motion. The defendant filed a timely notice of appeal and an application in the county court for leave to pursue an interlocutory appeal. See Mass. R. Crim. P. 15 (a) (2), as amended, 476 Mass. 1501 (2017). The single justice allowed the appeal to proceed in this court.
3. Discussion. In Lora, 451 Mass. at 437-438, 886 N.E.2d 688, we adapted general principles of our jurisprudence on selective prosecution in an attempt to address the persistent and pernicious problem of racial profiling in traffic enforcement. Today, we conclude that that decision placed too great an evidentiary burden on defendants, and that we must lower this burden in order to create a viable path for individuals to present and demonstrate their claims of racial profiling in traffic stops. While defendants still may raise a reasonable inference of racial profiling by demonstrating consistent patterns of racially disparate traffic enforcement by the officer involved, they also may raise a reasonable inference that a stop was racially motivated based on the totality of the circumstances surrounding the particular traffic stop at issue.
Furthermore, in our view the problem of discriminatory traffic stops continues to be best addressed under our equal protection jurisprudence and not, as Justice Budd's concurrence suggests, the search and seizure doctrine of art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. As to the stop of this defendant, even under the overly heavy evidentiary burden that resulted from our decision in Lora, we conclude that he presented more than adequate data to support his claim, and thus that the judge erred in denying his motion to suppress.
a. Equal protection framework. Our guarantee of equal protection under the law derives both from the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and arts. 1...
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