Commonwealth v. Ramos

• Decision Date: 26 February 2015
• Docket Number: SJC–11680.
• Citation: 25 N.E.3d 849,470 Mass. 740
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. Alex RAMOS.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

470 Mass. 740

25 N.E.3d 849

COMMONWEALTH

v.Alex RAMOS.

SJC–11680.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Essex.

Argued Nov. 4, 2014.

Decided Feb. 26, 2015.

Todd C. Pomerleau, Boston, for the defendant.

Quentin Weld, Assistant District Attorney (Elin H. Graydon, Assistant District Attorney, with him) for the Commonwealth.

Present: GANTS, C.J., SPINA, CORDY, BOTSFORD, DUFFLY, LENK, & HINES, JJ.

Opinion

DUFFLY

, J.

The defendant was indicted on a charge of receiving a stolen motor vehicle, G.L. c. 266, § 28

; a codefendant was indicted on charges of receiving a stolen motor vehicle and of receiving stolen property with a value exceeding $250. The defendant sought to suppress evidence seized as a result of a warrantless search of his garage. A Superior Court judge, who was not the trial judge, denied the motion, concluding that the warrantless search of the defendant's garage was permissible due to exigent circumstances, and also that the search was permissible under what he termed an “accomplice sweep” exception to the warrant requirement, a concept that has not been adopted in the Commonwealth. Following a joint trial, a Superior Court jury convicted the defendant and acquitted the codefendant. The defendant appealed, and we transferred the case to this court on our own motion.

On appeal, the defendant claims error in the denial of his motion to suppress evidence seized during the warrantless search of his garage, and the admission in evidence of inculpatory statements made during recorded telephone conversations between the defendant and the codefendant. Additionally, the defendant argues that the Commonwealth's evidence was insufficient to support his conviction. We conclude that there was no error in the denial of the defendant's motion to suppress because police entry into the garage was justified based on exigent circumstances, there was no error in the admission of recordings of the jailhouse telephone calls, and the evidence was sufficient to support the defendant's conviction.

Evidence at trial. We summarize the facts the jury could have found, reserving additional facts for our discussion of the issues. On the morning of April 8, 2007, Derek Lam noticed that his blue Honda Civic automobile was missing from the driveway of his fiancée's house in Natick. He contacted police to have the LoJack transmitter¹ in the vehicle activated. Officer Robert Avery of the Lynn police department was on patrol in his police cruiser when, shortly after noon, he received a LoJack signal. Other officers used their LoJack units to assist him in pinpointing the location of the signal, a detached garage behind a house located at the corner of Gardiner and Florence Streets in Lynn. The house fronted on Gardiner Street, and the two-bay garage doors opened onto Florence Street. The yard between the house and the garage was enclosed by a stockade fence. Along the Florence Street side of the yard, the fence ran from the garage to the back of the house; on the other side of the yard, a stockade fence ran from Gardiner Street to Florence Street along the property line between the defendant's house and the house next door.

Avery parked his cruiser on Florence Street near the two-bay garage doors. When he got out of his cruiser, he could hear noises, like metal tools being used, coming from behind one of the garage doors. One of the overhead garage doors was open about three inches at the bottom. Avery approached the garage door and, after knocking and announcing “Lynn Police,” he could hear the sound of tools dropping and people running. Avery saw three men run from the back of the garage and through the back yard to the rear porch of the house; they were taken into custody immediately. After surrounding the property and obtaining a search warrant, officers found the defendant hiding inside the house. Police found the blue Honda Civic inside the garage, where the defendant, the codefendant, and two other men had been stripping its engine and various other parts.

Discussion. 1. Motion to suppress. Prior to trial, the defendant moved to suppress all evidence found during the warrantless search, and all evidence seized and statements made following execution of a warrant obtained as a result of that search.² After conducting an evidentiary hearing over two days at which three members of the Lynn police department testified, a Superior Court judge denied the motion. In reviewing a decision on a motion to suppress, “we accept the judge's subsidiary findings of fact absent clear error ‘but conduct an independent review of [the] ultimate findings and conclusions of law.’ ” Commonwealth v. Colon, 449 Mass. 207, 214, 866 N.E.2d 412

, cert. denied, 552 U.S. 1079, 128 S.Ct. 810, 169 L.Ed.2d 611 (2007), quoting Commonwealth v. Scott, 440 Mass. 642, 646, 801 N.E.2d 233 (2004).

a. Evidence at motion hearing. We recite the facts found by the motion judge, supplemented by additional, undisputed facts where they do not detract from the judge's ultimate findings and were implicitly credited by the judge. See Commonwealth v. Isaiah I., 448 Mass. 334, 337, 861 N.E.2d 404 (2007)

, S.C., 450 Mass. 818, 882 N.E.2d 328 (2008), and cases cited (court “may supplement judge's findings of fact if the evidence is uncontroverted and undisputed and where the judge explicitly or implicitly credited the witness's testimony”).

On April 8, 2007, Avery detected a LoJack signal while driving his cruiser on Park Lane Avenue in Lynn. He confirmed the signal with a police dispatcher and was informed that the signal was coming from a Honda Civic reported stolen in Natick. Avery followed the signal to a location at the corner of Florence and Gardiner Streets in Lynn. The house at that address fronted on Gardiner Street. The doors to a two-bay detached garage located behind the house opened onto Florence Street. Avery parked his police cruiser in the middle of Florence Street, near the garage bay doors. The garage was separated from the house by a yard which was surrounded by a stockade fence.

Officer Josh Hilton of the Lynn police department, who also had followed the LoJack signal, arrived at about the same time as Avery. Hilton parked his cruiser, walked over to the fence, and looked over it to see if the Honda Civic was inside the yard. He saw three automobile doors and other motor vehicle parts in the yard, but did not see an automobile. Hilton broadcast this information over his police radio. Hilton and Avery learned from another officer who heard Hilton's broadcast that the defendant lived at the Gardiner Street address; he was under investigation for running a “chop-shop”³ ; he previously had pleaded guilty to charges related to the theft of motor vehicles and stripping parts from stolen vehicles; and a resident of Chelsea whose vehicle had been stolen had located the vehicle's engine at the Gardiner Street address. Based on this, the officers were advised that the Gardiner Street address might be a “chop shop.”

Avery approached the garage bay door, where he could hear the sound of metal tools and what sounded to him like work being done on automobiles. He knocked on the door and announced, “Lynn Police.” At that point, Avery heard tools being dropped and people running. He told Hilton what he had heard; Hilton looked over the fence and saw two people running out of the garage toward the house. Avery also looked over the fence and saw three men running out of a regular door at the back of the garage, into the yard, and toward the house. When Avery ran around to the driveway side of the house, he saw only two men.

By that time, a third officer had arrived. The officers persuaded the two men to stop running and to jump over the fence, where the officers placed the men in handcuffs “for officer safety.” A neighbor signaled to the officers that a third person was hiding under a large pile of trash bags on the porch. Avery and Hilton entered the yard. Hilton located the codefendant, Warlin Santiago, under the pile of trash bags, and noted that his hands were covered in black grease. Avery then walked through the yard, back to the garage door from which the men had emerged, and looked inside. Avery could see a stripped, blue Honda Civic; he entered the garage, looked at the vehicle identification number (VIN), and confirmed that the VIN was that of the stolen vehicle the officers had been tracking.

After other officers arrived, police secured the area by surrounding the property while they sought a search warrant for the garage and the house; they believed that the defendant was inside the house. The warrant was obtained a few hours later and the defendant was arrested after he was found hiding inside the house.

b. Justification for warrantless entry. The defendant contends that the warrantless search of the garage violated his rights under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. “In the absence of a warrant, two conditions must be met in order for a nonconsensual entry to be valid: there must be probable cause and there must be exigent circumstances” (footnote omitted). Commonwealth v. DeJesus, 439 Mass. 616, 619, 790 N.E.2d 231 (2003)

. The defendant does not challenge the judge's finding that “the police had probable cause to believe that the stolen car was in the garage, was being dismantled and that the people fleeing were involved in the theft and dismantling.” The defendant argues, however, that the warrantless entry into the garage was not justified by exigent circumstances, because there were no exigent circumstances, and that the motion judge's reliance on the “accomplice sweep” exception was erroneous, because no such exception has been adopted in Massachusetts.

The Fourth Amendment requires that “all searches and seizures must be reasonable,” and that “a warrant may not be issued unless probable cause is properly established and the scope of the authorized search is set out with particularity.” Kentucky v....