Ransome v. State

• Decision Date: 14 February 2003
• Docket Number: No. 19,19
• Citation: 816 A.2d 901,373 Md. 99
• Parties: Deshawn RANSOME v. STATE of Maryland.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

816 A.2d 901

373 Md. 99

Deshawn RANSOME v. STATE of Maryland.

No. 19, Sept. Term, 2002.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

February 14, 2003.

Sherrie B. Glasser, Asst. Public Defender (Stephen E. Harris, Public Defender, on brief), Baltimore, for Petitioner.

Gary E. Bair, Solicitor General (J. Joseph Curran, Jr., Atty. Gen., on brief), Baltimore, for Respondent.

Argued before BELL, C.J., and ELDRIDGE, RAKER, WILNER, CATHELL, HARRELL and BATTAGLIA, JJ.

WILNER, Judge.

The State of Maryland contends that it is permissible for a police officer who observes a man doing nothing more than standing on a sidewalk on a summer night talking with a friend, to stop and frisk that person because (1) they were in a high-crime area, (2) the man had a bulge in his front pants pocket, (3) the man gazed at the unmarked police car containing three plain-clothed officers as it drove by and slowed to a stop, and (4) when the three officers got out of the car, approached the man, identified themselves as police officers, and one began to ask him questions, the man appeared nervous and avoided eye contact with the officer. The State is wrong. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968) does not go quite that far.

BACKGROUND

The relevant facts, taken from testimony presented at a suppression hearing, are essentially undisputed. At around 11:20 p.m. on July 28, 2000, Officer Javier Moro and two other officers were cruising in an unmarked police car along the 100 block of North Decker Street in Baltimore City—an area that had produced numerous complaints of narcotics activity, discharging of weapons, and loitering. They were looking for "loitering activity, congregation on vacant steps, [and] loud groups of people hanging around the corners." As they proceeded down the street, Moro noticed petitioner, Deshawn Ransome, with another man, either standing or walking on the sidewalk. Moro did not know petitioner or the other man and did not see them do anything unusual—petitioner did not reach into his pocket or exchange anything with the other man. They were not loitering or congregating on steps, and there is no evidence that they were loud or boisterous or hanging around a corner. They were simply there.

As the car approached the pair, it slowed to a stop and petitioner turned to look at the car. Officer Moro, for some reason, regarded that as suspicious. He also noted that petitioner had a large bulge in his left front pants pocket, which Moro took as an indication that petitioner might have a gun. The three officers promptly exited the car, and Moro approached petitioner. A second officer engaged the other man while the third remained close by observing both encounters. Moro said that "based upon the bulge, I was going to conduct a stop and frisk," but he decided to ask petitioner some questions first, "to buy me time to feel him out." (Emphasis added). He asked petitioner first whether Moro could talk to him, to which petitioner gave no response. He then asked petitioner's name and address, which petitioner gave. The address was about six or seven blocks away. Both answers were truthful.

At that point, pursuant to his admitted intention, Moro directed petitioner to place his hands on top of his head and proceeded to pat down his waist area—not the pocket area where he had noticed the bulge. That was the moment, according to Officer Moro, that petitioner was no longer free to leave. Moro detected a small bulge, which he suspected was a controlled dangerous substance, and that led him to search further. When he discovered a bag of marijuana in the waist area, he placed petitioner under formal arrest and continued his search incident to that arrest. The extended search revealed that the bulge in petitioner's pants pocket consisted of a roll of money—$946. In other parts of his clothing, Moro found 72 ziplock bags and some cocaine.

Petitioner was charged with simple possession and possession with intent to distribute marijuana and cocaine. Upon the denial of his motion to suppress the evidence taken from him, petitioner proceeded to trial on an agreed statement of facts, was convicted, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Court of Special Appeals affirmed that judgment, and we granted certiorari to consider whether Officer Moro had reasonable suspicion to conduct the stop and frisk that led to the discovery of the challenged evidence. Believing that he did not, we shall hold that the evidence was inadmissible and shall therefore reverse the judgment of the intermediate appellate court.

DISCUSSION

The State does not even suggest, much less argue, that Officer Moro had probable cause to seize and search petitioner. The issue is whether, under the rules of engagement announced in Terry v. Ohio, supra, he had reasonable suspicion to frisk petitioner for possible weapons.

Although hundreds—perhaps thousands—of stop and frisk cases have been decided since Terry was filed in 1968, the pronouncements in that case still provide both the Constitutional rationale and the basic Constitutional boundaries of the street-encounter stop and frisk, and it is therefore helpful to start by looking at what the Court said there. The stop and frisk in Terry took place after a seasoned police officer had observed two men, occasionally joined by a third, pacing back and forth along a short stretch of the street, pausing each time to look into a particular store window. This occurred about a dozen times over a twelve minute period. Suspicious that the men were "casing" the store in preparation for a robbery and concerned that they may therefore be armed, the officer confronted them and patted down their outer clothing, finding that each was in fact armed. The issue, as here, was the admissibility of the fruits of the pat-down search.

The Court began its analysis by confirming that, although a mere accosting and engagement of a person in conversation may not invoke Fourth Amendment protections, a stop and frisk does—that when the officer grabbed Mr. Terry, there was a Fourth Amendment "seizure," and that when he conducted his pat-down frisk, there was a search. Terry, supra, 392 U.S. at 19, 88 S.Ct. at 1879, 20 L.Ed.2d at 904-05. Noting that the Fourth Amendment proscribes "unreasonable" searches and seizures, the Court viewed the question as whether those actions, judged against an objective standard, were reasonable: "would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search `warrant a [person] of reasonable caution in the belief' that the action taken was appropriate?" Id. at 21-22, 88 S.Ct. at 1880, 20 L.Ed.2d at 906 (quoting, in part, Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 162, 45 S.Ct. 280, 288, 69 L.Ed. 543, 555 (1925)). In that regard, the Court concluded that:

"When an officer is justified in believing that the individual whose suspicious behavior he is investigating at close range is armed and presently dangerous to the officer or to others, it would appear to be clearly unreasonable to deny the officer the power to take necessary measures to determine whether the person is in fact carrying a weapon and to neutralize the threat of physical harm."

Id. at 24, 88 S.Ct. at 1881, 20 L.Ed.2d at 908. It iterated that point and restated its conclusion thusly:

"[T]here must be a narrowly drawn authority to permit a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer, where he has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual, regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest the individual for a crime. The officer need not be absolutely certain that the individual is armed; the issue is whether a reasonably prudent [person] in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his [or her] safety or that of others was in danger [citations omitted]. And in determining whether the officer acted reasonably in such circumstances, due weight must be given, not to his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or `hunch,' but to the specific reasonable inferences which [the officer] is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his experience."

Id. at 27, 88 S.Ct. at 1883, 20 L.Ed.2d at 909. Earlier in the opinion, the Court made clear that, "in justifying the particular intrusion the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion," noting in a footnote that "[t]his demand for specificity in the information upon which police action is predicated is the central teaching of this Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence." Id. at 21, 88 S.Ct. at 1880, 20 L.Ed.2d at 906.

The case law since Terry has refined, in a myriad of contexts, the circumstances under which a seizure actually occurs, when a search exceeds the proper bounds of a Terry frisk, and how the factual circumstances known to and articulated by the officer are to be viewed in determining whether they suffice to engender a reasonable suspicion, but the fundamental contours of Terry remain in place. See United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273-74, 122 S.Ct. 744, 750-51, 151 L.Ed.2d 740, 749-50 (2002); Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 123-24, 120 S.Ct. 673, 675-76, 145 L.Ed.2d 570, 575-76 (2000); Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 695-96, 116 S.Ct. 1657, 1661, 134 L.Ed.2d 911, 918-19 (1996); Nathan v. State, 370 Md. 648, 659-60, 805 A.2d 1086, 1093 (2002); Cartnail v. State, 359 Md. 272, 285-86, 753 A.2d 519, 526-27 (2000).

One of the clarifications made by the Supreme Court is that, in determining whether an officer possessed a reasonable suspicion sufficient to justify a stop and frisk, the court must look at the "totality of the circumstances" and not parse out each individual circumstance for separate consideration, Arvizu, supra, 534 U.S. at 274, 122 S.Ct. at 751, 151 L.Ed.2d at 750; United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 8, 109 S.Ct. 1581,1585, 104...