People v. Bell
| Decision Date | 09 June 1986 |
| Citation | 121 A.D.2d 455,503 N.Y.S.2d 145 |
| Parties | The PEOPLE, etc., Respondent, v. Leon BELL, Appellant. |
| Court | New York Supreme Court — Appellate Division |
Donald E. Gilbert, New York City, for appellant.
Elizabeth Holtzman, Dist. Atty., Brooklyn (Barbara D. Underwood and Roseann B. MacKechnie, of counsel), for respondent.
Before MANGANO, J.P., and GIBBONS, KOOPER and SPATT, JJ.
MEMORANDUM BY THE COURT.
Appeal by the defendant from a judgment of the Supreme Court, Kings County (Goldman, J.), rendered November 19, 1984, convicting him of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the third degree, upon his plea of guilty, and imposing sentence. The appeal brings up for review the denial, after a hearing (Alfano, J.), of that branch of the defendant's omnibus motion which was to suppress physical evidence seized by the police.
Judgment reversed, on the law, that branch of the defendant's motion which was to suppress physical evidence granted, indictment dismissed, and matter remitted to the Supreme Court, Kings County, for the purpose of entering an order in its discretion pursuant to CPL 160.50.
On October 6, 1983, the defendant and three other occupants of the automobile in which he was a passenger were stopped by the police and ordered out of the vehicle at gunpoint. One police officer directed them to put their hands on top of the car and then, spotting a small brown paper bag on the floor in the rear of the vehicle where the defendant got out, immediately proceeded to search it. After discovering foil packets in the bag containing cocaine in an aggregate weight of 1/8 of an ounce plus 53 grams, the officers arrested the occupants of the vehicle and searched their persons. One aluminum foil packet was recovered from the defendant. The charges of criminal possession of a controlled substance against the vehicle's other three occupants were dismissed.
At the defendant's suppression hearing, the arresting officer testified that he and his partner had been flagged down by an unknown and unidentified citizen who informed them that "the guys in the car had just robbed someone at gunpoint around the corner". Without obtaining any further information or the identity of the citizen informant or the alleged victim, the officers pursued the vehicle which was a block and half away and travelling erratically. No weapon was ever recovered, and the citizen informant could not be located after the arrests. Nor did a complainant ever come forward. The arresting officer stated that he searched the brown paper bag which he described as smaller than a lunch bag and twisted closed at the top, because he felt that it might contain a weapon. He stated that he could not tell that the bag did not contain a weapon, notwithstanding its size and that it did not weigh more than 1 1/2 ounces. He also stated that he searched the bag before frisking the occupants standing outside the car.
Finding the stop of the car lawful, based upon the officers' reasonable suspicion that the occupants had committed a crime, the suppression court denied that branch of the motion which was to suppress, based upon its finding that, as a passenger, the defendant "had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the area of the vehicle in which the brown paper bag and its contents were recovered" and, therefore, lacked standing to seek suppression of the drugs recovered from the paper bag in the vehicle.
It is well established that in order to prevail on a suppression motion, a defendant must not only show that the police action was unlawful, but that his own Fourth Amendment rights were violated, i.e., the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the area searched (see, People v. Hunter, 55 N.Y.2d 930, 449 N.Y.S.2d 191, 434 N.E.2d 260; Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 99 S.Ct. 421, 58 L.Ed.2d 387; Rawlings v. Kentucky, 448 U.S. 98, 100 S.Ct. 2556, 65 L.Ed.2d 633). The doctrine of automatic standing is no longer valid (see, People v. Ponder, 54 N.Y.2d 160, 445 N.Y.S.2d 57, 429 N.E.2d 735; United States v....
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