Juliano v. State

• Decision Date: 10 September 2021
• Docket Number: No. 320, 2019,320, 2019
• Parties: Heather JULIANO , Defendant Below, Appellant, v. STATE of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Delaware

260 A.3d 619

Heather JULIANO ¹ , Defendant Below, Appellant,

v.STATE of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.

No. 320, 2019

Supreme Court of Delaware.

Submitted: June 16, 2021

Decided: September 10, 2021

Patrick J. Collins, Esquire, Collins & Associates, Wilmington, Delaware for Appellant Heather Juliano.

John R. Williams, Esquire, Department of Justice, Dover, Delaware for Appellee State of Delaware.

Before SEITZ, Chief Justice; VALIHURA, VAUGHN, TRAYNOR, and MONTGOMERY-REEVES, Justices, constituting the Court en banc.

TRAYNOR, Justice, for the Majority:

After the sport-utility vehicle in which Heather Juliano was a passenger was stopped because of a suspected seat-belt violation, one of the investigating officers detected an odor of marijuana coming from the vehicle. Based on that odor alone, the occupants of the vehicle, including Juliano, were immediately ordered out of the vehicle and placed under arrest. The police searched Juliano at the scene and then transported her to their station where they told her that they intended to perform a strip search, prompting Juliano to admit that she had concealed contraband—marijuana and cocaine—in her pants. Juliano was then escorted to another room where she retrieved and handed over the drugs. Juliano was then charged with several drug offenses.

Before her trial, Juliano moved to suppress the drugs that the police seized from her, claiming, among other things, that her arrest and the ensuing searches were not supported by probable cause. The State responded that the odor of marijuana emanating from the area of the vehicle where Juliano was seated and on her person provided probable cause for Juliano's arrest. And, the State argued, because the arrest was lawful, the searches of Juliano at the scene and at the station were incident to her arrest and hence lawful.

In two separate orders—one following the suppression hearing and the other on remand by this Court of that first order—the Family Court agreed with the State and denied Juliano's motion. In this appeal, Juliano contends that, although the odor of marijuana may support the extension of a traffic stop or serve as a factor contributing to probable cause to search a person or vehicle, it does not, standing alone, authorize a full custodial arrest.

In this opinion, we hold that, under the totality of the circumstances presented by the State in this unusual case, including the vagueness of the officers’ description of the marijuana odor, the timing of their detection of that odor, and the absence of any other observations indicative of criminality, Juliano's arrest was unreasonable and therefore violates the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 6 of the Delaware Constitution. It follows that the evidence obtained following Juliano's unlawful arrest should have been suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree. This being so, we reverse.

I. BACKGROUND

A. Juliano's arrest and the searches that followed

Our discussion of the facts surrounding Juliano's arrest draws from our November 2020 opinion, as well as a fresh review of the record and the Family Court's Order on Remand.

On January 29, 2019, Corporal Robert Barrett of the Dover Police Department was on patrol in Dover. Barrett was accompanied by Probation Officer Rick L. Porter as part of the Department's Operation Safe Streets (OSS) program, an "enhanced law enforcement ... initiative" that pairs adult probation officers with police officers, which, when it was conceived in the late 1990s and early 2000s, "targets high-risk probationers to ensure that they remain in compliance with curfews and other conditions of their probation."² In the current environment, however, the Safe Streets task force engages in a broader range of law enforcement activity and is not limited to the supervision of high risk probationers. According to Corporal Barrett, for instance, Safe Streets officers target "violent offenders, ... guns[,] and drugs,"³ by, among other things, making traffic stops for minor violations and "tak[ing] every traffic stop as far as [they] can."⁴

On the afternoon in question, Corporal Barrett spotted a sport-utility vehicle, driven by Shakyla Soto, leaving an area of Dover known as Capitol Green and noticed that the occupant of the front passenger seat—believed by Barrett at the time to be a Black male in his early twenties⁵ —was not wearing a seat belt. This observation prompted Barrett to pull the SUV over. In our November 2020 opinion, we described what happened next:

Barrett approached the SUV on the driver's side, while Porter was on the passenger side. Barrett recognized the passenger as Juliano and noticed that she was putting her seat belt on. Almost immediately after Barrett initiated contact with the driver, he heard Porter say "1015 which [, according to Barrett,] means take ... everybody into custody." As of that moment, Barrett had not smelled an odor of marijuana or noticed any other evidence of foul play, and he was not sure why Porter was directing him to take all of the car's passengers, including back-seat passengers, Zion Saunders and Keenan Teat, into custody. At the time, Barrett speculated that Porter had detected "an odor of marijuana or a weapon or contraband." Porter later told Barrett that, indeed, it was the odor of marijuana that prompted his instructions.

Three other Dover Police Department officers arrived on the scene in very short order. In fact, one of the officers—James Johnson, the one who took custody of and searched Juliano—arrived on the scene before any of the car's occupants had exited the vehicle.

In response to Porter's "10-15" directive, Barrett took Soto into custody and placed her in handcuffs. Barrett then searched Soto—like Juliano, a female—and found nothing .... [A]s Barrett escorted Soto to the rear of the SUV for the purpose of searching her, he "could smell marijuana very strong coming from Ms. [Juliano]."

According to Barrett, all four occupants of the SUV were removed from the vehicle and handcuffed in response to Porter's order. The SUV was then searched, but no contraband was found. The officers then searched each of the vehicle's occupants. Barrett confirmed that these searches went beyond a pat-down for weapons[.]

...

One officer searched Teat and found a knotted bag containing crack cocaine in one of his pants pockets. Another officer searched Saunders and found both marijuana and heroin in his jacket pockets. But when Officer Johnson searched Juliano, he found no contraband. He did, however, find $245.00.⁶

Juliano was transported to the Dover Police Department where she was told that "a more thorough search was going to be done by a female and [was] asked if she had anything on her;"⁷ rather than consent to the strip search, Juliano admitted that she did. Juliano was then escorted to another room where she retrieved a bag of marijuana and a bag of cocaine from within her pants. The ensuing strip search of Juliano yielded nothing. Juliano was charged with Tier 1 possession of narcotics with an aggravating factor, drug dealing, and possession of marijuana with an aggravating factor.⁸

B. Procedural History

Juliano moved the Family Court to suppress "all evidence seized as a result of her arrest and subsequent warrantless search and seizure."⁹ According to Juliano's motion:

[t]he officers’ stop of the vehicle operated by Ms. Soto was not based on reasonable suspicion that a traffic violation or other criminal activity had occurred, and thus not justified. In fact, the officers’ stopping of the vehicle and subsequent search was entirely pretextual. Furthermore, the officers’ arrest and subsequent search of [Juliano] was not supported by probable cause, and thus not justified. The officers’ threat of strip searching a juvenile, without a warrant, was not justified and a violation of her right to privacy.¹⁰

After an evidentiary hearing, the Family Court denied Juliano's motion, finding

that the seat-belt violation justified the stop, rejecting Juliano's argument that the officers’ reliance on that violation was an unlawful pretext. The court then observed that once the officers stopped the vehicle, they were justified in ordering the driver and occupants out of the vehicle. From there, the court focused on the "independent facts" (odor of marijuana, familiarity with Juliano's criminal history, the officer's experience with adults handing off drugs to juveniles, and the drugs found on the person of the back-seat passengers) that, in the court's view, justified the search of Juliano's person. Missing from the court's analysis though was any discussion of whether the facts that arguably justified a search of Juliano's person at the scene also justified her arrest and transportation to police headquarters for a strip search.¹¹

At Juliano's trial, the prosecution presented two witnesses—Corporal Barrett and Heather Moody, the forensic chemist who tested the substance Juliano turned over to the police after she was arrested. The Court adjudicated Juliano delinquent on all three charges—aggravated possession of cocaine, drug dealing, and aggravated possession of marijuana.

Juliano appealed her adjudication of delinquency to this Court, focusing her challenge to the lawfulness of the officers’ search of her person on the pretextual nature of the antecedent motor vehicle stop. She also argued that, once the police suspected a marijuana offense, they were required to consider the possibility that Juliano could have been in lawful possession of marijuana under the Delaware Medical Marijuana Act.

In a November 12, 2020 opinion, we rejected both of Juliano's appellate claims, but remanded the matter to the Family Court "for a more complete statement of the factual and legal basis ... for the court's conclusion [in its initial order] that ‘the search of [Juliano's] person was supported by probable cause[ ] and that [Juliano's] ... arrest ... was proper.’ "¹² The Family Court provided that statement in...