Duckett v. US, No. 03-CM-1462.

• Decision Date: 17 November 2005
• Docket Number: No. 03-CM-1462.
• Citation: 886 A.2d 548
• Parties: Dustin DUCKETT, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES, Appellee.
• Court: D.C. Court of Appeals

886 A.2d 548

Dustin DUCKETT, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES, Appellee.

No. 03-CM-1462.

District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Argued October 26, 2005.

Decided November 17, 2005.

Charles H. Fitzpatrick, Washington, DC, for appellant.

Alessio D. Evangelista, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Kenneth L. Wainstein, United States Attorney, John R. Fisher, Assistant United States Attorney at the time the brief was filed, and David B. Goodhand and Leah L. Belaire, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief for appellee.

Before SCHWELB and GLICKMAN, Associate Judges, and NEWMAN, Senior Judge.

GLICKMAN, Associate Judge:

Appellant Dustin Duckett moved to suppress marijuana recovered from his jacket and his car following a traffic stop. After an evidentiary hearing, the trial judge denied the motion, rejecting Duckett's claim that the stop violated the Fourth Amendment. The judge thereafter found Duckett guilty of possession with intent to distribute marijuana, in violation of D.C.Code § 48-904.01(a)(1) (2001). We hold that the marijuana should have been suppressed because the traffic stop was not justified by reasonable grounds to suspect Duckett of violating the law.

At the hearing on Duckett's motion, the two main witnesses were Officer Henry Gallagher and Sergeant Evelyn Best, both of the Metropolitan Police Department. Officer Gallagher testified that he was on routine patrol in his scout car when he saw Duckett driving a four-door Ford with standard metal District of Columbia license plates affixed to the vehicle. Although Officer Gallagher had no reason to focus on Duckett's car, he "arbitrarily" entered its license plate number in the mobile computer terminal in his scout car to retrieve information about it from the Washington Area Law Enforcement System ("WALES") and the National Criminal Information Center ("NCIC") databases.¹ No information was forthcoming, however. Instead of displaying vehicle registration data from WALES, the portion of the screen where that information should have appeared was blank. The area of the screen set aside for NCIC data contained only the message, "NO RECORD." Officer Gallagher had experience stopping other vehicles after receiving such (non-)responses to his WALES and NCIC checks; ninety percent of the time, he testified, the vehicle turned out to be unregistered (a traffic offense).² Accordingly, Officer Gallagher decided to conduct a traffic stop to investigate. In the course of doing so, he smelled marijuana, which led to Duckett's arrest and the recovery of the contraband from the car and from Duckett's jacket.

As it happens, Duckett's car was not unregistered. Duckett had registered it with the District of Columbia Department of Motor Vehicles ("DMV") five weeks before Officer Gallagher stopped it. The car was bearing the license plate it had been issued. A certified record from the DMV showing the current, valid registration of Duckett's car at the time of the stop was admitted in evidence at the suppression hearing. Had WALES reported this fact in response to Officer Gallagher's inquiry, he would have known that he had no justification to make the traffic stop.³

Sergeant Best, who served as the Metropolitan Police Department's NCIC and WALES program manager, explained the functioning of the two systems. The NCIC system, she testified, is a national computerized database that contains information about stolen vehicles and license plates, among other things. The "NO RECORD" response that Officer Gallagher received from NCIC simply meant that neither Duckett's vehicle nor its license plate had been reported stolen; the response did not signify that the vehicle was unregistered. WALES, on the other hand, is a local police database. WALES does contain vehicle registration data, downloaded to it from the DMV and updated on a weekly basis. WALES therefore should have reported the current registration of Duckett's vehicle with the license plate number that Officer Gallagher entered.

That WALES had no information on a properly registered vehicle in this case was not unusual, however; if anything, according to Sergeant Best, this was a rather "frequent" occurrence. Generally speaking, Sergeant Best testified, a blank screen response to a WALES check on a D.C. license tag number means that the number is not in the WALES database for one of two main reasons: either the DMV has not yet updated WALES with the registration information for the vehicle, i.e., the vehicle was registered and issued a license plate after the last weekly update; or a clerical or computer error of some kind has interfered with the DMV's download of the information.⁴ In neither case would the lack of a response from WALES signify that the license plate number is invalid or that the vehicle is unregistered. Only one other possible cause of a blank screen response from WALES was identified at the suppression hearing: the possibility that the D.C. license plate number is not in the WALES database because the plate and its number are phony (in which case the vehicle probably is unregistered).⁵ Sergeant Best explained, however, that this third possibility is very unlikely in a case, such as this one, involving a metal license plate. As opposed to temporary "paper" tags, the metal plates "can't" be altered, Sergeant Best testified, and there was no evidence that metal license plates were being counterfeited; "in my years of experience," she added, "I've never seen that done."⁶

Sergeant Best's explanatory testimony was uncontested. In spite of that testimony, the trial judge ruled that it was objectively reasonable, and hence permissible under the Fourth Amendment, for Officer Gallagher to stop Duckett's car to determine whether it was registered, given the officer's experience that a blank screen response from WALES was correlated nine times out of ten with a vehicle that proved to be unregistered. With that ruling we disagree.

As the trial judge recognized and the government readily acknowledges, the legality of the stop under the Fourth Amendment depends on whether Officer Gallagher had at least a reasonable, articulable suspicion that he was witnessing a traffic violation. In examining that question ourselves, we defer to the trial judge's material factual findings, but we review his ultimate legal conclusion de novo. Trice v. United States, 849 A.2d 1002, 1005 (D.C.2004)

.

Officer Gallagher suspected that Duckett's car was unregistered because his inquiry about Duckett's license plate number elicited no information from the NCIC and WALES databases. Sergeant Best's testimony establishes, however, that the lack of information from NCIC and WALES did not warrant such an inference. The "NO RECORD" response from NCIC indicated only that the vehicle (and its license plate) had not been reported stolen. The blank screen response from WALES merely implied that, in all likelihood, either the DMV simply had not yet transmitted the registration information for Duckett's vehicle to WALES, or an error had occurred in the transmission. Neither response implied that the car was unregistered. That Duckett's metal D.C. license plate theoretically could have been a fake was too remote a possibility, especially compared to the two most likely and innocuous reasons for the blank screen response, to have justified the inference of non-registration that Officer Gallagher drew. The government has advanced no other possible rationale to explain how the blank screen that Officer Gallagher observed logically could have implied that Duckett was driving an unregistered vehicle.⁷ Lacking such an explanation, the government has...