People v. Finch

• Decision Date: 13 May 2014
• Docket Number: No. 28,28
• Parties: The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Nature G. FINCH, Appellant.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

23 N.Y.3d 408
15 N.E.3d 307
991 N.Y.S.2d 552
2014 N.Y. Slip Op. 03424

The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent
v.
Nature G. FINCH, Appellant.

No. 28

Court of Appeals of New York.

May 13, 2014.

Hiscock Legal Aid Society, Syracuse (Philip Rothschild of counsel), for appellant.

William J. Fitzpatrick, District Attorney, Syracuse (Joseph Centra and James P. Maxwell of counsel), for respondent.

OPINION OF THE COURT

SMITH, J.

15 N.E.3d 308

We hold that, where a defendant has unsuccessfully argued before trial that the facts alleged by the People do not constitute the crime charged, and the court has rejected the argument, defendant need not specifically repeat the argument in a trial motion to dismiss in order to preserve the

15 N.E.3d 309

point for appeal. We also hold that the argument defendant makes here has merit, and requires reversal of his conviction for resisting arrest.

I

Calleasha Bradley was a tenant at Parkside Commons, a federally-subsidized apartment complex in Syracuse. Defendant, who did not live in the complex, was the father of Bradley's child. Bradley and defendant met with Nicole Smith, the Park-side Commons property manager, and asked her to allow defendant to come on the property to visit his son. After verifying that defendant had not “had any trouble” for a period of about two years, Smith gave him permission to visit, but warned him that, because of a “no loitering policy,” defendant “would need to be with his son, not at various points of the property doing other things.”

On April 28, 2009, James Quatrone and Todd Hood, police officers patrolling Parkside Commons, saw defendant and three other adults in the lobby of one of the buildings, with a marijuana cigarette in the vicinity. The officers arrested defendant for trespassing. Bradley was not present during the April 28

arrest, but while Quatrone was waiting with defendant for a car to the Justice Center, Bradley emerged from a building, made a video (but not audio) recording of the event on her cellphone, and expressed her unhappiness about the officers' actions in strong terms. While witnesses' recollections of what was said differ, the evidence (described in more detail below) shows conclusively, in our view, that Quatrone knew as of April 28 that defendant was on the property with Bradley's consent.

After the April 28 incident, Smith revoked the permission she had given defendant to visit his son, and informed the police that defendant was no longer allowed at Parkside Commons. Defendant nevertheless continued to enter the property, at Bradley's invitation. Quatrone arrested him twice more for trespassing, on May 12 in the lobby of another building and on May 27 in a parking lot.

The May 27 arrest led to the resisting arrest charge that is the subject of this appeal. On being told that day that he was under arrest, defendant replied: “You can't arrest me.” Quatrone told defendant to turn around and tried to pull his arm behind his back; defendant tried to walk away. Quatrone grabbed him and, with the help of other officers, forcibly handcuffed him. Defendant made the handcuffing difficult by pressing his arm against the hood of a car with his body.

Defendant was charged with three counts of criminal trespass and one of resisting arrest. A jury in City Court acquitted him of the first trespass charge, relating to April 28, but convicted him on the remaining counts.

County Court reversed defendant's convictions for trespass, but affirmed the resisting arrest conviction. In County Court's view, defendant could not be a trespasser because he was Bradley's invited guest: “[A] tenant with a lease to a specific apartment in an apartment complex has the inherent right to invite guests and ... those guests ... are licensed and privileged to be in or upon the property” (internal quotation marks omitted). County Court concluded, however, that Quatrone had probable cause to arrest defendant and that therefore the resisting arrest conviction was valid.

A Judge of this Court granted defendant leave to appeal (People v. Finch, 20 N.Y.3d 986, 958 N.Y.S.2d 701, 982 N.E.2d 621 [2012] ). The People cross-moved for leave to appeal from the reversal of the trespass convictions, but the cross motion

15 N.E.3d 310

was dismissed as untimely (20 N.Y.3d 1098, 965 N.Y.S.2d 794, 988 N.E.2d 532 [2013] ), and the resisting arrest conviction is therefore the only

one before us. We agree with defendant that the evidence is insufficient to support that conviction, and we reverse.

II

Before reaching the merits, we must decide whether defendant has preserved for appeal his argument that Quatrone lacked probable cause to arrest him for trespass on May 27 because Quatrone knew that Bradley had invited defendant to be on the premises. We hold that the argument is preserved.

Defendant made that argument at virtually the earliest possible moment—at arraignment in City Court on one of the criminal trespass charges. Challenging the sufficiency of the accusatory instrument, defendant argued that the police failed “to understand why somebody might be there ... who might have license to be there by the tenants.” Later in the same proceeding, he argued that the court “should dismiss” the charge unless defendant had been excluded “in compliance with [Bradley's] rights as tenant.” He added that the court should be “even more skeptical” of the case because “this woman who lives in that, saying he's got a right to be there ... should be good enough. Who's got a right to say that he can't be there? It's her premises. She's entitled to have guests and family members there.”

The City Court Judge responded by specifically rejecting the view that Bradley could consent, over management's objection, to defendant's presence: “What the law says is ... either she makes her peace with the management or she moves out ... if she said, ‘I want to have this person here because he's the father of my child,’ she makes her peace with the management.” Unlike our dissenting colleagues (see dissenting op of Abdus–Salaam, J. at 429–430, 991 N.Y.S.2d at 567-68, 15 N.E.3d at 322-23 [hereafter, the dissent] ), we do not read this ruling as being directed solely to the conditions of pretrial release; the ruling followed only moments after defense counsel's request: “you should dismiss.” But the more important point is that City Court ruled definitively on the legal argument that defendant makes on this appeal. Having received an adverse ruling, defendant did not specifically urge the same theory again in support of his motion to dismiss for insufficiency of the evidence at trial. But he did not have to: once is enough (People v. Mahboubian, 74 N.Y.2d 174, 188, 544 N.Y.S.2d 769, 543 N.E.2d 34 [1989] [insufficiency claim preserved by pretrial motions, “even though defendants did not specifically seek dismissal on that basis at the close of the People's evidence”] ).

As a general matter, a lawyer is not required, in order to preserve a point, to repeat an argument that the court has definitively rejected (People v. Jean–Baptiste, 11 N.Y.3d 539, 544, 872 N.Y.S.2d 701, 901 N.E.2d 192 [2008] [having made a specific motion to dismiss for legal insufficiency, defendant was not required to make the same point as an exception to the charge]; People v. Payne, 3 N.Y.3d 266, 273, 786 N.Y.S.2d 116, 819 N.E.2d 634 [2004] [“We decline to ... elevate preservation to a formality that would bar an appeal even though the trial court ... had a full opportunity to review the issue in question”] ). When a court rules, a litigant is entitled to take the court at its word. Contrary to what the dissent appears to suggest, a defendant is not required to repeat an argument whenever there is a new proceeding or a new judge.

It is true that a challenge to the sufficiency of the accusatory instrument at arraignment is conceptually different from a

15 N.E.3d 311

challenge based on the proof at trial, and that often an issue decided in one proceeding will not be the same as the issue presented in another. But here the issue was the same. It is also true that defendant's initial argument was addressed to a trespass count and not the probable cause element of the resisting arrest count. But once the court held that an invited guest whose license has been withdrawn by management is a trespasser, it necessarily followed that Quatrone did not lack probable cause to arrest defendant for trespass on the ground that he was an invited guest. The dissent's contrary view rests on a simple confusion. Of course the court's pretrial ruling could not resolve every aspect of “the fact-intensive issue of probable cause” (dissent at 431, 991 N.Y.S.2d at 569, 15 N.E.3d at 324), and we do not suggest that it did. Our point is simply that the trial court could not, without abandoning the ruling it had already made, have accepted the specific argument that, in the dissent's view, defendant should have repeated when moving to dismiss the count at trial. It is clear to us that the repetition would have been an unnecessary ritual, and nothing the dissent says persuades us otherwise.

The dissent also points to the seeming oddity that...