U.S. v. Coplin, 05-2077.

• Decision Date: 20 September 2006
• Docket Number: No. 05-2077.,05-2077.
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Eddie COPLIN, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 96

463 F.3d 96

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Eddie COPLIN, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 05-2077.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard August 1, 2006.

Decided September 20, 2006.

Bernard Grossberg, for appellant.

Randall E. Kromm, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Michael J. Sullivan, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee.

Before TORRUELLA, SELYA and DYK,^* Circuit Judges.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

This appeal hinges on an interesting and important point in the jurisprudence of the Fourth Amendment: does reasonable suspicion, based on a plausible but mistaken view of the facts, justify a Terry stop? The district court answered this question in the affirmative, and so do we. Consequently, we uphold the district court's denial of the defendant's motion to suppress. We also reject, more easily, the defendant's remaining claims of error, which challenge the district court's regulation of cross-examination and its sentencing protocol.

I. BACKGROUND

We rehearse the facts as the district court found them, consistent with record support. See United States v. Romain, 393 F.3d 63, 66 (1st Cir.2004).

On July 1, 2002, the Boston police were intensifying their patrol of the Grove Hall neighborhood in response to a recent incident of gun violence. Just before 4:45 p.m. on that date, Officers Scott O'Brien and Steven Rioux spotted a Honda Accord and decided to run a check of its license plate because, as Officer O'Brien later testified, Hondas are stolen with more frequency than virtually any other make of automobile.

In Boston, police cruisers are commonly equipped with mobile data terminals (MDTs). These MDTs are linked to various databases including those of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles and the National Crime Information Center. Officer O'Brien entered the Honda's license plate number into the MDT and, according to both officers, the MDT indicated that the owner of the car had a suspended driver's license.

The officers pulled up behind the Honda near the corner of Blue Hill Avenue and Quincy Street. O'Brien disembarked from the cruiser and approached the driver's-side door of the Honda, while Rioux approached the passenger's-side door. O'Brien confirmed that the operator of the vehicle, defendant-appellant Eddie Coplin, was the vehicle's owner. He then asked the defendant to disembark. As the defendant exited the vehicle, he tried to keep his right hand out of view and close the door behind him. During that process, O'Brien spied a gun on the driver's seat. O'Brien immediately placed the defendant under arrest and instructed Rioux to handcuff him.

When this transpired, the passenger in the stopped car, Sheila Fuentes, became visibly agitated, started to move into the driver's seat, and disregarded the officers' instruction to keep her hands in sight. In response, the police handcuffed her as well. Subsequent searches revealed eleven baggies of marijuana in Fuentes's purse and a sack of cocaine base in her lingerie.

Following his detention, the defendant insisted that he held a valid driver's license. O'Brien re-entered the license plate number into the MDT and showed the defendant a screen that indicated the suspended license. At that point, however, O'Brien noticed, apparently for the first time, a screen indicating that the defendant's license was in full force.

II. TRAVEL OF THE CASE

In due season, a federal grand jury indicted the defendant on various firearms and drug charges involving the items that the police had retrieved from the car and from Fuentes's person. The defendant moved to suppress these items, challenging the constitutionality of the initial traffic stop.

The district court held a two-day evidentiary hearing on the motion to suppress. Officers O'Brien and Rioux testified about the events surrounding the stop and the ensuing arrest. Neither officer recalled having seen an active license indicator prior to initiating the stop. The government also presented the testimony of Officer Vincent Stancato, a technical trainer in the police department's information technology division. Stancato provided background information on the workings of the MDT system and its wonted use within the police department.

Pertinently, Stancato testified that after a query (such as a license plate number) is entered into an MDT unit, data from the networked databases filter back to the unit at varying speeds.¹ The MDT unit displays the information it receives in the form of successive screens. The data reflected in the later screens supersede — that is, are more accurate and, hence, more reliable than — the data reflected in the earlier screens.

In order to receive the updated information screens, a user is prompted to hit a "next message" button. Using this modality, every officer is trained to scroll through successive data screens in order to reach the most up-to-date information about the subject matter in question. O'Brien testified that he had done exactly that.

With respect to the MDT query in this case, the district court admitted into evidence a printout from the MDT system. The printout tracked the flow of data beginning with O'Brien's initial entry of the license plate number at 4:45 p.m. (recorded as time 16:45:44) on the afternoon of July 1, 2002.² The MDT printout indicated that five and six seconds later (that is, at 16:45:49 and again at 16:45:50), the data flow indicated that the car's owner had an active driver's license. Instantaneously thereafter, also at 16:45:50, the printout indicated a suspended license. While Officer Stancato could not determine from the printout whether O'Brien and Rioux actually had seen the earlier screens indicating a valid driver's license, he testified that based on how the system works the officers would have had to scroll through the earlier screens in order to reach the later-received screen that reported a suspended license (the information upon which the officers based the stop).³

At the conclusion of the hearing, the district court ruled from the bench. Relying on Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 116 S.Ct. 1769, 135 L.Ed.2d 89 (1996), the court found that the police department's decision to target the Grove Hall area and focus its attention on "high-risk vehicles" was within the encincture of its discretion. As to the stop itself, the court found it likely that Officer O'Brien had "conflated the information that he had" by making "the suspension the only observation with respect to the license." This conflation, whatever its source, did not trouble the court because "even if [O'Brien] saw both" license entries, he "did focus on what was the ultimate determination here that justified the stop. And that is that it was a suspended license." The court found O'Brien's testimony credible and his actions reasonable, given that events were unfolding rapidly in "realtime." Indeed, the printout reveals that there was a delay of only one second between the initial screen showing an active license and the later screen showing a suspended license.

The district court concluded that the officers had reasonable suspicion to stop the defendant's car in order to investigate whether the driver was operating on a suspended license. This reasonable suspicion justified the initial stop, and the combination of the defendant's behavior, the sighting of the gun, and Fuentes's antics collectively justified the arrest and the ensuing searches.

After the district court denied his motion to suppress, the defendant entered a conditional plea of guilty to each of the four counts contained in the superseding indictment, reserving his right to appeal the suppression ruling. See Fed. R.Crim.P. 11(a)(2). The district court thereafter sentenced the defendant to an aggregate incarcerative term of 180 months: 120 months on count 2, 60 months on each of counts 1 and 3 (to run concurrently with each other and with the sentence on count 2), and 60 months on count 4 (to run consecutively to the terms imposed for the other three counts). This appeal followed.

III. DISCUSSION

The defendant assigns error to the district court's refusal to suppress, its regulation of cross-examination, and its sentencing protocol. We discuss these claims of error sequentially.

A. Refusal to Suppress.

The defendant's challenge to the district court's denial of his motion to suppress is narrowly focused. The main thrust is directed to the validity of the stop itself. The applicable standards of review are familiar. In considering the denial of a motion to suppress, we accept the trial court's findings of fact unless they are clearly erroneous and subject its conclusions of law to de novo review. Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 699, 116 S.Ct. 1657, 134 L.Ed.2d 911 (1996); Romain, 393 F.3d at 68.

It is axiomatic that a brief investigatory stop "constitutes a seizure within the purview of the Fourth Amendment and, therefore, is subject to the constitutional imperative that it must be reasonable under all the circumstances." Romain, 393 F.3d at 70-71 (citing Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968)). An officer may conduct such a stop if he has a "reasonable, articulable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot." Id. at 71. The officer's initial actions must be justified at their inception and his subsequent actions must be "responsive to the emerging tableau — the circumstances originally warranting the stop, informed by what occurred, and what the officer learned, as the stop progressed." United States v. Chhien, 266 F.3d 1, 6 (1st Cir. 2001). These benchmarks require us to assess the totality of the circumstances, on a case-specific basis, in order to ascertain whether the officer had a particularized, objectively reasonable basis for suspecting wrongdoing (and, thus, for making the initial stop). United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273, 122 S.Ct. 744, 151 L.Ed.2d 740 (2002).

In this instance, the district...