Lyons v. United States
| Decision Date | 25 July 1966 |
| Docket Number | No. 3994.,3994. |
| Citation | 221 A.2d 711 |
| Parties | Albert LYONS, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES, Appellee. |
| Court | D.C. Court of Appeals |
Charles R. Work % Georgetown Law School, Washington, D. C. (appointed by this court) for appellant.
Dean W, Determan, Asst. U. S. Atty., with whom David G. Bress, U. S. Atty., and Frank Q. Nebeker and Geoffrey M. Alprin, Asst. U. S. Attys., were on the brief, for appellee.
Before HOOD, Chief Judge, and QUINN and MYERS, Associate Judges.
This appeal is from a conviction under our Narcotic Vagrancy statute.1 At trial and here appellant has challenged the legality of his arrest and the search which followed.
The arresting officer, Gibson, testified that he arid two other officers in plain clothes were in a private automobile parked in front of a building on Fourth Street, Southeast watching for daytime housebreakings in that area. At about 12:30 p. m. Officer Gibson saw an automobile drive up and stop near the building. The officer recognized one of the occupants of the car to be a man named Spriggs, known to the officer as a thief and a convicted narcotic user. There were two other men in the car Chandler, the driver, and Lyons, the appellant here. Neither of these men was known to the officer. Spriggs alighted from the car, "looked around in a suspicious manner" and went into the building. The car, operated by Chandler and occupied by appellant, then circled the block and parked on Fourth Street about 200 yards from the building. Spriggs came out of the building about ten minutes later, "looked up and down the street," and then walked to and entered the car. As the car was pulling away from the curb, the officers drove their car alongside, and when one of Gibson's partners identified himself as a police officer, Chandler stopped his car.
Officer Gibson got out of his car and as he walked toward the other car, he observed Spriggs place into his shoe a brown or tan envelope which he "suspected of being narcotics." Gibson placed Spriggs under arrest and removed a package from his shoe containing 96 capsules of white powder. Gibson then advised Chandler and Lyons that they also were under arrest. Sometime thereafter an examination of Lyons' arm disclosed needle marks and upon being questioned Lyons admitted he was a narcotic user.2
The questions of exactly when Spriggs' arrest occurred and the legality of his arrest have been argued; but we find no occasion for answering those questions. Assuming, but not deciding, that Spriggs was arrested after the officer had probable cause to make the arrest and that his arrest was a...
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State v. Moore
...cause were not admissible at his trial.' The District of Columbia Court of Appeals considered this question in the case of Lyons v. United States, 221 A.2d 711 (1966). There, the defendant Lyons was arrested with no probable cause under the narcotics vagrancy statute. He was arrested while ......
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Smith v. United States
...that flight from authority implies another person's consciousness of guilt. . . .") (emphasis added); see also Lyons v. United States, 221 A.2d 711 (D.C.App.1966) (pre-Terry probable cause case) (holding that defendant's association with a known narcotics user, who in fact possessed narcoti......
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United States v. Johnson
...created entirely by association, a repugnant principle that until today has been rejected by this court. For example, in Lyons v. United States, 221 A.2d 711 (D.C.1966), we were faced with a similar scenario: the police were on the lookout for housebreakings, and they observed a stopped car......
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Ricks v. United States
...456-458, 59 S.Ct. 618, 83 L.Ed. 888 (1939). See also Baker v. United States, 228 A.2d 323 (D.C.App.1967). 37 See Lyons v. United States, 221 A.2d 711, 712 (D.C.App.1966) (prior knowledge that accused is narcotic user or convicted narcotic offender is prerequisite to narcotic vagrancy arrest......