State v. Garcia-Cantu, PD-0936-07.

Decision Date07 May 2008
Docket NumberNo. PD-0937-07.,No. PD-0936-07.,PD-0936-07.,PD-0937-07.
Citation253 S.W.3d 236
PartiesThe STATE of Texas v. Candelario GARCIA-CANTU, Appellee.
CourtTexas Court of Criminal Appeals

Ellis Munoz, Conroe, for Appellant.

Marc Brumberger, Asst. D.A., Conroe, Jeffrey L. Van Horn, State's Attorney, Austin, for the State.

OPINION

COCHRAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which MEYERS, PRICE, WOMACK, JOHNSON and HOLCOMB, JJ., joined.

In this case, we examine the distinction between a citizen-police "encounter" and a citizen-police "detention." A "detention" implicates the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure restrictions and requires articulable suspicion to support even a temporary seizure, while an "encounter" is not subject to any Fourth Amendment requirements or restrictions.1 We conclude that, under the totality of the circumstances test set out in Florida v. Bostick,2 the trial judge did not err in finding that the officer's conduct in this case resulted in a Fourth Amendment detention. We therefore reverse the judgment of the court of appeals, which had held that the trial court improperly granted appellee's motion to suppress.3

I.

Appellee was charged with the misdemeanor offenses of possession of marijuana and carrying a weapon. At the hearing on the motion to suppress, the State and appellee agreed that the only issue to be litigated was whether the facts supported the finding of a Fourth Amendment detention or a consensual citizen-police encounter.4

Officer Okland testified that he had been with the Conroe Police Department for eighteen months. He was on routine patrol in the 300 block of South Pacific at about 4:00 a.m. on December 26th, when he saw a green Ford truck parked at the end of the block.5 Officer Okland stated that the 300 block of South Pacific is a dead-end street, with two houses on the right, railroad tracks on the left, and high grass and woods at the end of the street.6 Officer Okland testified that this was a "high-crime" area for drugs and prostitution,7 but when he was shown a written police call sheet, he did not dispute that there had been only two drug arrests in the prior six months and no prostitution arrests in that area.8 The officer saw that the truck's dome light was on and two people were inside the truck. He decided to investigate.

Officer Okland turned on his patrol car spotlight "to make sure that they weren't doing harm to me." He was "letting them know it was a police officer behind them." But then he said, "If I had wanted them to know it was a police officer I would have turned my overhead lights on, to indicate I was detaining them. But I just wanted to see what they were doing in there." He was still driving up behind the truck at the time he put on his spotlight. Officer Okland parked his patrol car about ten feet behind the truck and to its left, and he turned on his dashboard-mounted camera to record the investigation. He then saw movement on the driver's side area of the truck.9 He got out of his patrol car and began advancing toward the truck, holding a long flashlight in both hands at shoulder level as he walked forward. When Officer Okland played his flashlight across the driver's side of the truck, appellee got out of that side and met the officer in the middle of the road.

The trial judge questioned Officer Okland further: "[A]nd you got your spotlight on and you want me to believe that with a spotlight on, they could drive away?" Officer Okland said, "Yes," although he agreed that he had "[n]ever had anybody who has had his spotlight turned on them drive away." The trial judge continued to question the officer about the location of his patrol car which appeared to block appellee's truck at the end of the street:

Court: They were stopped. You just came up upon them.

Officer: They would have to back up and I would have to move for them to—

Court: Then you had them blocked in where they couldn't move?

Officer: They could have backed up

Court: They could have backed up?

Officer: I would have moved. I wouldn't have let them hit me.

Court: Oh, could they have backed up and gotten out of the parked area they were in with you not having to move your vehicle?

Officer: No sir.

Court: So you were so close to them that they couldn't do anything but stay there, is that right?

Officer: Well, I was a good ten — or about a car length away from their vehicle when I stopped.

Officer Okland then suggested that appellee could have backed up and driven on the wrong side of the roadway and around his patrol car, but the video indicates that the officer's car was parked well to the left side of the road.10 The trial judge asked a final question:

Court: And what we have here is, you're telling me that if this person would have simply backed up, even though your overhead or your spotlight was on, or whatever was on, and you're pulled up within ten feet of this other vehicle, they were free to leave? That's what you want me to believe?

Officer: Yes, sir.

Mr. Garcia-Cantu, appellee, also testified. He said that he saw Officer Okland pulling up behind him, but he couldn't see anything more except a big spotlight, "a big white light." The officer didn't tell him that he could leave, and he didn't believe that he was free to leave. Mr. Garcia-Cantu said that he lives about two blocks away, on the other side of the railroad tracks, and this is his neighborhood. He has friends who live on that block, and he was just waiting for his friend who was inside the house.11

After hearing all of the testimony, the trial judge granted Mr. Garcia-Cantu's motion to suppress without making explicit factual findings, and the State appealed that ruling.

The court of appeals stated that "the record reveals the trial court required that Okland articulate a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity to justify his approach to Garcia-Cantu's truck and that Okland's use of the spotlight was sufficient to amount to a detention."12 The court of appeals noted that this Court has previously held that a police officer's use of a spotlight was insufficient to amount to a Fourth Amendment detention.13 The court of appeals concluded,

We also find the trial court abused its discretion in determining under these circumstances that spotlighting Garcia-Cantu's truck resulted in Garcia-Cantu's detention.14

We granted appellee's petition to determine, inter alia, whether Officer Okland's actions constituted a detention requiring reasonable suspicion under Bostick's "totality of the circumstances" test.

II.
A. Standard of Review

In reviewing a trial court's ruling on a motion to suppress, appellate courts must view all of the evidence in the light most favorable to the trial court's ruling.15 When the trial court does not make explicit findings of fact, the appellate court infers the necessary factual findings that support the trial court's ruling if the record evidence (viewed in the light most favorable to the ruling) supports these implied fact findings.16 Thus, we afford almost total deference to a trial judge's determination of the historical facts that the record supports, especially when his implicit factfinding is based on an evaluation of credibility and demeanor.17 This same highly deferential standard applies regardless of whether the trial court has granted or denied a motion to suppress evidence.18 Thus, the party that prevailed in the trial court is afforded the strongest legitimate view of the evidence and all reasonable inferences that may be drawn from that evidence. But the question of whether a given set of historical facts amount to a consensual police-citizen encounter or a detention under the Fourth Amendment is subject to de novo review because that is an issue of law-the application of legal principles to a specific set of facts.19

B. Citizen-Police Encounters and Fourth Amendment Detentions

As the Supreme Court has aptly noted, "encounters between citizens and police officers are incredibly rich in diversity."20 They run the gamut from "wholly friendly exchanges of pleasantries" to "hostile confrontations of armed men, involving arrests, injuries, or loss of life."21 Given this wide diversity of police-citizen interaction, not every encounter between the two is subject to Fourth Amendment scrutiny. It is only when an officer, "by means of physical force or show of authority, has in some way restrained the liberty of a citizen," will courts conclude that a Fourth Amendment "seizure" has occurred.22 Such a seizure occurs when, "taking into account all of the circumstances surrounding the encounter, the police conduct would have `communicated to a reasonable person that he was not at liberty to ignore the police presence and go about his business.'"23

In Florida v. Bostick,24 the Supreme Court reiterated that an encounter between a police officer and a citizen "will not trigger Fourth Amendment scrutiny unless it loses its consensual nature."25 In Bostick, the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine whether the Florida Supreme Court's per se rule that police officers who boarded buses at scheduled stops and questioned passengers without articulable reasons for doing so necessarily "seized" those passengers within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.26 The Supreme Court rejected the lower court's per se rule because it "rested its decision on a single fact — that the encounter took place on a bus — rather than on the totality of the circumstances."27 Thus, Bostick mandates that

a court must consider all of the circumstances surrounding the encounter to determine whether the police conduct would have communicated to a reasonable person that the person was not free to decline the officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter.28

While the "cramped confines" of a bus was certainly one relevant factor for the Florida courts to consider in evaluating whether a particular interaction between an officer and a citizen was a consensual encounter29 or a Fourth...

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