State v. Thomas

• Citation: 110 N.J. 673,542 A.2d 912
• Parties: STATE of New Jersey, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Isaac THOMAS, Defendant-Appellant.
• Decision Date: 30 June 1988
• Court: United States State Supreme Court (New Jersey)

Page 673

110 N.J. 673

542 A.2d 912

STATE of New Jersey, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Isaac THOMAS, Defendant-Appellant.

Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Argued March 1, 1988.

Decided June 30, 1988.

Marcia Blum, Asst. Deputy Public Defender, for defendant-appellant (Alfred A. Slocum), Public Defender, attorney.)

Leslie F. Schwartz, Deputy Atty. Gen., for plaintiff-respondent (W. Cary Edwards, Atty. Gen. of New Jersey, attorney).

The opinion of the Court was delivered by

STEIN, J.

The question presented in this case is whether a police officer was justified in conducting a protective search for weapons on a suspect who was the target of an investigatory stop. Defendant, Isaac Thomas, pled guilty to possession of a controlled dangerous substance after the trial court denied his motion to suppress evidence discovered during the search. The Appellate Division affirmed the conviction, upholding the denial of the motion. We granted certification, 108 N.J. 658, 532 A.2d 237 (1987), and we now reverse.

I

Both defendant and the investigating officer testified at the suppression hearing. The trial court accepted the credibility of the officer. We find no basis to disturb that ruling and therefore accept as true the officer's account of the relevant facts.

On May 3, 1985, at about midnight, Detective-Sergeant Williams of the Passaic Detective Bureau received a message from a police dispatcher that an anonymous informant had telephoned the police. The caller said that a man named Ike, dressed in a plaid cap, tan jacket, and wearing gold frame glasses, was in possession of illegal drugs inside the Shangri La Bar at 265 Passaic Street.

Williams and two other officers proceeded to the Shangri La Bar. The officers entered the bar, and Williams observed that the defendant, one of approximately twenty-five people in the bar, fit the informant's description. The officer also recognized defendant from a prior arrest for drug possession. Williams testified that on confronting the defendant, he immediately "asked him to stand away from the bar and I proceeded to frisk him * * * for any possible weapons or anything that may be in his possession at that time." Further, Williams recalled that "I feeled [sic ] what he had was inside his jacket pocket, was something that appeared to be sharp inside of the pocket." The following colloquy occurred during Williams' cross-examination:

Q. Okay. So you went into his pocket and the first item that you felt when you went in his pocket was a straw, or the thing that alerted you that it might be a possible weapon was a straw, is that correct?

A. Sort of a weapon or a potential weapon. You have to be careful with cocaine dealers because they carry razor blades with them, not to harm anyone, but to cut the cocaine up prior to injecting it, so you have to be very--when you're putting your hand inside somebody's pocket, you have to be careful because you might end up losing your finger, inadvertently losing your finger, so it's a situation like that. I felt something sharp there so I went there to extract it because I didn't know if it potentially could be used as a weapon.

When the detective reached into the pocket, he took hold of several objects. He pulled out a two-inch straw (later identified as the sharp object), a pack of rolling papers, a hand-rolled cigarette, a tinfoil packet containing cocaine, and a manila envelope containing marijuana. Thereafter, Williams placed defendant under arrest.

In denying defendant's motion to suppress the articles seized during the search, the trial court found that it was proper for the police to have responded to the anonymous tip and confront defendant in the bar. Further, the court held that the "combination of all the factors" described by Officer Williams provided a justifiable basis for the pat-down search of defendant. Finally, the court concluded that Detective Williams had not exceeded the permissible scope of such a search by emptying defendant's pocket, and thus the cocaine was discovered legitimately. Following denial of the suppression motion, defendant pled guilty to unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous substance.

The Appellate Division affirmed in an unpublished decision. The court agreed with the trial court that the anonymous tip justified the initial investigatory stop. The Appellate Division observed that when the information relayed by the tip was "combined with the detective's knowledge of defendant's prior drug law violation, a sufficient degree of suspicion justified frisking the defendant for a razor." Further, "[t]he likelihood the defendant possessed the razor came from the detective's prior drug law enforcement experience." The court also held that the search "did not go beyond the scope of a protective purpose."

II

In this case we have no occasion to consider the subjective factors that might prompt a law-enforcement official to search a suspect who is the subject of a lawful investigatory stop and is thought to pose a threat to the officer's safety. Rather, we apply the principles established by the United States Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), and its progeny to determine whether the record contains sufficient evidence of objective criteria to support the search of defendant, which in turn determines the admissibility of the evidence seized. Cf. State v. Bruzzese, 94 N.J. 210, 219, 463 A.2d 320 (1983) (constitutionality of search and seizure determined by "objectively reasonable" standard).

In Terry the Court addressed for the first time the issue of when and how law-enforcement personnel may stop and question a suspect, without his consent, in the absence of grounds for an arrest. The Court recognized that establishing the fourth-amendment parameters for such procedures required balancing significant governmental interests. On the one side is the interest in prohibiting unreasonable and unwarranted official intrusion on private citizens. On the other side, as the Court stated, "[w]e are now concerned with more than the governmental interest in investigating crime; in addition, there is the more immediate interest of the police officer in taking steps to assure himself that the person with whom he is dealing is not armed with a weapon that could unexpectedly and fatally be used against him." 392 U.S. at 23, 88 S.Ct. at 1881, 20 L.Ed.2d at 907.

The Court announced what has become known as the Terry rule:

We merely hold today that where a police officer observes unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous, where in the course of investigating this behavior he identifies himself as a policeman and makes reasonable inquiries, and where nothing in the initial stages of the encounter serves to dispel his reasonable fear for his own or others' safety, he is entitled for the protection of himself and others in the area to conduct a carefully limited search of the outer clothing of such persons in an attempt to discover weapons which might be used to assault him. [ Id. at 30-31, 88 S.Ct. at 1884-85, 20 L.Ed. at 911.]

The first component of the Terry rule concerns the level of reasonable suspicion that must exist before an "investigatory stop" legitimately may be undertaken. This involves something less than the probable cause standard needed to support an arrest. A police officer must be able "to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant" the intrusion. Id. at 21, 88 S.Ct. at 1879, 20 L.Ed.2d at 906. More recently, in United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 101 S.Ct. 690, 66 L.Ed.2d 621 (1981), the Court reiterated this requirement, stating that an investigatory stop must be justified by some objective manifestation that the suspect was or is involved in criminal activity. Id. at 417, 101 S.Ct. at 695, 66 L.Ed.2d at 628. The essence of this standard is "that the totality of the circumstances--the whole picture--must be taken into account. Based upon that whole picture the detaining officers must have a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity." Id. at 417, 101 S.Ct. at 695, 66 L.Ed.2d at 629; accord State v. Davis, 104 N.J. 490, 504, 517 A.2d 859 (1986) (adopting totality-of-circumstances standard announced in Cortez ).

Under the Terry rule, whether there is good cause for an officer to make a protective search incident to an investigatory stop is a question separate from whether it was permissible to stop the suspect in the first place. Terry established that to protect himself, an officer may perform a reasonable search for weapons

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 man in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his safety or that of others was in danger.

* * *

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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 he is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his experience. [392 U.S. at 27, 88 S.Ct. at 1883, 20 L.Ed.2d at 909 (citations omitted; emphasis supplied).]

The reasonableness of the search, therefore, is to be measured by an objective standard. More than an officer's generalized statements and subjective impressions are required. The officer must be able "to point to particular facts from which he reasonably inferred that the individual was armed and dangerous." Sibron v. New York, 392 U.S. 40, 64, 88 S.Ct. 1889, 1903, 20...