State v. Brooks

• Decision Date: 06 December 2002
• Docket Number: No. 935, No. 934, No. 937
• Citation: 148 Md. App. 374,812 A.2d 342
• Parties: STATE of Maryland, v. Jamar BROOKS, Latonia Brooks, and Charlton Frederick Anderson.
• Court: Court of Special Appeals of Maryland

812 A.2d 342

148 Md. App. 374

STATE of Maryland, v. Jamar BROOKS, Latonia Brooks, and Charlton Frederick Anderson.

Nos. 934, 935, 937, Sept. Term, 2002.

Court of Special Appeals of Maryland.

December 6, 2002.

Rachel Marblestone Kamins, Asst. Atty. Gen. (J. Jospeh Curran, Jr., Atty. Gen., Baltimore and Joseph I. Cassily, State's Atty. for Harford County of Bel Air, on the brief), for Appellant.

Margaret A. Mead (Mead & Flynn P.A., on the brief for appellees, Jamar and Latonia Brooks), Baltimore. Counsel for appellee, Anderson adopts co-appellees' brief.

JAMES R. EYLER, GREENE, CHARLES E. MOYLAN, JR. (Ret., specially assigned), JJ. CHARLES E. MOYLAN, Jr., Retired, Specially Assigned.

It is a well-settled principle of law that an appellate court, when reviewing a suppression hearing ruling, will accept as the basis for its analysis that version of the evidence (as well as that version of the inferences that may be drawn from the evidence) most favorable to the prevailing party. The principle is self-evidently a two-edged sword. The State, far more frequently than not, wields that sword with triumphant gusto, as again and again defense evidence and defense arguments are disdained as if non-existent. It is a stern standard.¹ On rarer occasions, however, it is the State that may be cut by that same sword. If there is a moral to this appeal, it is that those who are frequently content to live by the sword must accept the risk that occasionally they may die by the sword.

The appellees, Jamar Brooks, Latonia Brooks, and Charlton Frederick Anderson, were all indicted by the Grand Jury for Harford County under a five-count indictment, charging the possession of cocaine and a variety of related offenses. Prior to trial in the Circuit Court for Harford County, the appellees moved to have all the physical evidence suppressed as the fruit of a Fourth Amendment violation. Following a hearing on May 24, 2002, Judge Stephen M. Waldron granted the motion to suppress. Pursuant to Maryland Code, Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article, § 12-302(c)(3), the State has brought this appeal from that suppression hearing.

The physical evidence in question was all recovered as a result of a warrantless entry into a residence at 646 Harpark Court at 4:35 P.M. on June 1, 2001, by Deputy Gregory Young of the Harford County Sheriff's Department. The only issue before Judge Waldron was the Fourth Amendment reasonableness of that warrantless entry. He ruled that it was unreasonable. We hold that he was not in error in so ruling.

The Nature of Our Holding

There is a single overriding question before us on this appeal. Although the circumstances of the warrantless entry are, of course, tangentially involved in our analysis, the primary question before us is not whether the warrantless entry was unreasonable. We do not know whether it was or not and it is not for us to say. We did not see or hear the witnesses. We have no localized sense of what had been happening in the area where the entry occurred or of what the general reputation of local law enforcement was for restraint or for zealousness. We are far removed from the ground where the action took place. We were not then, and are not now, called upon to make the quintessentially factual determination of whether the warrantless entry was unreasonable.

The far more limited issue before us is whether Judge Waldron was in error, as a matter of law, in making his determination that he deemed it to have been unreasonable. We hold that he was not. This case, therefore, does not stand for, and should not be cited for, the proposition that an evidentiary predicate indistinguishable from that in this case would necessarily require a conclusion that a warrantless entry based upon it would be unreasonable. Such an evidentiary predicate would, we hold, permit that conclusion, but it would by no means compel it. Had Judge Waldron, on the evidence before him in this case, reached the opposite conclusion that the warrantless entry was, indeed, reasonable and had the defendants appealed that hypothetical ruling, we would still have affirmed.

That we, at least tentatively, might think that, had we been at the suppression hearing, we would have ruled the entry in this case to have been reasonable is beside the point. Judge Waldron, in making a ruling that was rooted in fact-finding, in credibility assessment even in its more subtle and modest ranges, and in the weighing of the significance of even essentially undisputed evidence, was free to go either way, secure from appellate second-guessing. Our holding is not that Judge Waldron should have made the ruling that he did, but only that he could have made the ruling he did.

This case, therefore, to the extent that it will be categorized, is not primarily a case about the Fourth Amendment. It is more significantly a case about the highly deferential standard of appellate review for essentially fact-based trial court rulings.

The Community Caretaking Function

The State's theory of the case is that Deputy Young entered 646 Harpark Court not in an investigatory capacity but in the execution of his community caretaking function, as he responded to a scene of possible domestic violence. In State v. Alexander, 124 Md.App. 258, 266-80, 721 A.2d 275 (1998), we examined at length the community caretaking function of the police and its Fourth Amendment implications. We quoted with approval from 3 Wayne R. LaFave, A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment, § 6.6, pp. 389-90 (3d ed.1996), as Professor LaFave noted the distinction between entering a premises for investigative purposes and entering the same premises for other purposes.

Preceding sections of this Chapter have been concerned with the entry of private premises by police for the purpose of arresting a person thought to be within or for the purpose of finding the fruits, instrumentalities or evidence of some past crime. Although it is entries for those purposes which most often give rise to a motion to suppress, requiring a ruling upon the validity of the entry and subsequent conduct of the police, quite clearly police have occasion to enter premises without a warrant for a variety of other purposes.

124 Md.App. at 266, 721 A.2d 275 (emphasis in original).

Professor LaFave, id., went on to note the diversity of those other non-investigative purposes:

The police have complex and multiple tasks to perform in addition to identifying and apprehending persons committing serious criminal offenses; by design or default, the police are also expected to reduce the opportunities for the commission of some crimes through preventative patrol and other measures, aid individuals who are in danger of physical harm, assist those who cannot care for themselves, resolve conflict, create and maintain a feeling of security in the community, and provide other services on an emergency basis. An entry and search of premises purportedly undertaken for such reasons as these may sometimes result in the discovery of evidence of crime.

Id. at 267, 721 A.2d 275 (emphasis supplied).

In State v. Alexander, we attributed the label "community caretaking function" to a 1973 Supreme Court decision:

What has been lacking for those other, non-investigative police functions is a convenient shorthand label. In the context of the police responsibility to handle vehicular accidents, Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 441, 93 S.Ct. 2523, 37 L.Ed.2d 706, 714-15 (1973), chose, as a ready reference, the term "community caretaking function."

Local police officers ... frequently investigate vehicle accidents in which there is no claim of criminal liability and engage in what, for want of a better term, may be described as community caretaking functions, totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.

Id. (emphasis in original).

In Stanberry v. State, 343 Md. 720, 684 A.2d 823 (1996), the Court of Appeals placed its seal of approval on the label "community caretaking function" as it recognized the pivotal distinction between assessing police behavior when the police are "acting in their criminal investigatory capacity" and assessing police behavior when they are "acting to protect public safety pursuant to their community caretaking function." 343 Md. at 742-43, 684 A.2d 823. Judge Raker there wrote for the Court:

[A]lthough we find today that, under the circumstances presented in the instant case, the police search of Petitioner's luggage was unlawful, we stress that our holding is limited to the conduct of the police when they are acting in their criminal investigatory capacity. As the Iowa Supreme Court stated in discussing the rationale for the emergency-aid exception to the warrant requirement:

In essence police officers function in one of two roles: (1) apprehension of criminals (investigative function); and (2) protecting the public and rescuing those in distress (caretaking function). Courts have noted that preservation of human life is paramount to the right of privacy protected by the fourth amendment. Thus the emergency-aid exception is justified because the motivation for the intrusion is to preserve life rather than to search for evidence to be used in a criminal investigation.

State v. Carlson[,] 548 N.W.2d 138, 141 (Iowa 1996) (citations omitted). Our holding does not apply to situations in which the police are acting to protect public safety pursuant to their community caretaking function.

(Emphasis in original).

Avoiding Possible Analytic Confusion: Two Different "Exigency" Contexts

The community caretaking function embraces an open-ended variety of duties and obligations that are not directly involved with the investigation of crime. As we analyzed in State v. Alexander, 124 Md. App. at 269-73, 721 A.2d 275, one subcategory of community caretaking involves rendering emergency aid to those believed to be in distress or in need of that...