Miller v. State

• Decision Date: 22 November 2010
• Docket Number: No. S10G0158.,S10G0158.
• Parties: MILLER v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

702 S.E.2d 888

288 Ga. 286

10 FCDR 3831

MILLER

v.The STATE.

No. S10G0158.

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Nov. 22, 2010.

Michael L. Edwards, Savannah, for appellant.

Larry Chisolm, Dist. Atty., Christine S. Barker, Asst. Dist. Atty., for appellee.

MELTON, Justice.

This case regards the trial court's grant of Ashaunte Miller's motion to suppress evidence of cocaine and a firearm found in his possession after he was stopped by Officer James Williams. In State v. Miller, 300 Ga.App. 55, 684 S.E.2d 80 (2009), the Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's grant of the motion to suppress after determining that a de novo standard of review applied to the State's appeal. We granted certiorari to consider the propriety of this holding. For the reasons set forth below, we find that the Court of Appeals erred by applying a de novo standard of review, and, as a result, we reverse.

1. In Tate v. State, 264 Ga. 53, 440 S.E.2d 646 (1994), we discussed three fundamental principles which must be followed when conducting an appellate review of a motion to suppress.

First, when a motion to suppress is heard by the trial judge, that judge sits as the trier of facts. The trial judge hears the evidence, and his findings based upon conflicting evidence are analogous to the verdict of a jury and should not be disturbed by a reviewing court if there is any evidence to support it. Second, the trial court's decision with regard to questions of fact and credibility must be accepted unless clearly erroneous. Third, the reviewing court must construe the evidence most favorably to the upholding of the trial court's findings and judgment. On numerous occasions the appellate courts of this state have invoked these three principles to affirm trial court rulings that upheld the validity of seizures. These same principles of law apply equally to trial court rulings that are in favor of thedefendant and theirapplication to this trial court's order would demand that the court's order be affirmed.

(Citations, punctuation and footnote omitted.) Id. at 54(1), 440 S.E.2d 646.¹

To properly follow the first principle, we must focus on the facts found by the trial court in its order, as the trial court sits as the trier of fact. Those facts are as follows:

The evidence shows that on July 30, 2008, a team of officers from the Savannah-Metropolitan Police Department's TRAP unit were driving around the westside of Savannah on a general patrol of the area for drug activity. The officers were traveling along the 600 block of west 34th Street when they saw a group of six or seven black men standing near a vehicle in a vacant lot. One of the men was applying tinting to the car's window. The car had no visible license plate. The officers, who wore vests identifying them as law enforcement, stopped at the scene, exited their van and approached the group of men. [Miller], who was part of the group standing near the vehicle, walked away from the scene and headed in the direction of his mother's home, which was next to the vacant lot. Officer James Williams followed [Miller] and ordered him not to move. Officer Williams eventually apprehended [Miller] and wrestled him to the ground. After Officer Williams secured [Miller] on the ground, he observed a gun sticking from [Miller's] pocket. Officer Williams later conducted a pat-down and found a plastic bag containing a substance, confirmed by subsequent crime lab tests to be cocaine, in [Miller's] pants pocket.

Second, the trial court's decision with regard to questions of fact and credibility must be accepted unless clearly erroneous. Based on the trial court's order, it is evident that the trial court questioned the credibility of the bases provided for the stop by Officer Williams. In fact, just before holding that Officer Williams stopped Miller based on a "mere hunch" and only "general suspicion," the trial court explicitly stated: "In addition, the Court notes that although Officer Williams testified recently at the suppression hearing that thesefacts were the basis for the stop, he did not mention the window tinting or the missing license plate in the incident report he filed or during his testimony at defendant's preliminary hearing." Later in its order, the trial court again explicitly addresses the unreliability of Officer Williams' testimony. The trial court's order states:

At the motion hearing, Officer Williams testified that another man ran away from the scene when the officers first arrived and that he focused his attention on defendant who began running towards the house next to the vacant lot. At the preliminary hearing, Officer Williams testified, however, that defendant was the only person who attempted to leave the scene after the officers exited their vehicle. Thus, it is questionable whether Officer Williams was aware of this other person's flight when he began pursuing defendant.

This is overtly a credibility determination. Officer Williams' version of events given at the motions hearing was explicitly found to be "questionable" due to its inconsistency with his prior testimony. This credibility finding drew into question the only basis upon which Officer Williams maintained that his stop of Miller was objectively reasonable. See Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 116 S.Ct. 1769, 135 L.Ed.2d 89 (1996) ( Terry stop analysis is based on objective criteria, not on subjective motive of police).

Third, the reviewing court must construe the evidence most favorably to the upholding of the trial court's findings and judgment. In this case, based on the findings of fact and the determinations of credibility described above, the trial court found that

Officer Williams had simply no objective and particularized basis to pursue, apprehend and wrestle [Miller] to the ground. Indeed, the record shows that Officer Williams pursued [Miller] and wrestledhim to the ground prior to observing [Miller's] gun or acquiring any objective basis to believe that [Miller] may have violated a law.

(Emphasis in original.) As a result of this finding, the trial court granted Miller's motion to suppress. This Court, therefore, has an obligation to construe the evidence most favorably to support this finding and judgment. The record supports the trial court's findings that, at the time that Officer Williams stopped him, Miller was merely standing next to a car in a vacant lot with a group of other men, while one of the men applied tint to the car's windows. Officer Williams never saw Miller do anything "illegal" before he stoppedhim, and, given Officer Williams' inconsistencies in articulating his reasons for apprehending Miller, it cannot be said that the trial court erred in finding that the stop was based only on a mere hunch. As a result, the trial court's decision to grant the motion to suppress was not clearly erroneous and must be affirmed. Id.

2. The dissent espouses the reversal of the trial court's grant of Miller's motion to suppress by inappropriately reviving the same analysis rejected by this Court in Tate, supra, for its failure to follow each of the fundamental principles set forth above.² The dissent violates the first principle of appellate review by focusing on its own assessment of the facts, rather than the facts set forth by the trial court. As in its dissenting opinion in Tate, the dissent maintains that it is allowed to premise its ruling on evidence that all of the officers stopped Miller in concert because some of the officers testified to this effect and this testimony was undisputed.³ Such reliance on undisputed testimony to recharacterize the trial court's order was rejected in Tate, as the "trier of fact is not obligated to believe a witness even if the testimony is uncontradicted and may accept or reject any portion of the testimony." Id. at 56(3). Accordingly, the trial court may have chosen not to include any mention of the evidence forming the basis of the dissent's decision because the trial court rejected that portion of the officers' testimony. Therefore, upon consideration of only the first principle of appellate review, the foundation for the entirety of the dissent's argument fails, as it is not allowed to base its review on undisputed evidence which is not considered in the trial court's order and which is contrary to the trial court's ruling.

The dissent's analysis also violates the second principle of appellate review, as there is no question that credibility determinations played a significant part in the trial court's ruling. The trial court explicitly questioned the bases presented as the purpose for thestop of Miller. This credibility question lies at the very core of the trial court's ruling, and it should not be negated by this Court. Moreover, the dissent's analysis requires it to make credibility determinations not made by the trial court. The dissent, itself, finds the testimony from other officers at the scene of Miller's stop to be credible, and it then imposes this credibility determination onto the ruling of the trial court. Such actions are clearly improper.

Additionally, the dissent maintains that explicit credibility determinations contained inthe trial court's order may be discounted as irrelevant based on the dissent's independent selection of evidence that should not be considered in the first place. To fuse onto the trial court's ruling its own findings of fact and credibility regarding the testimony of the other officers that the stop was committed by all of the officers in concert, the dissent paraphrases Silva v. State, 278 Ga. 506, 604 S.E.2d 171 (2004), for the following proposition: "The only conclusion that can be reached on review is that the trial court credited the officer[s'] testimony, ... and decided the motion of an issue of law rather than on any issue of conflicting evidence." This statement is illogical under the facts and judgment of this case, and it violates all three appellate standards of review at once. Given the trial court's ultimate ruling, it is...