Watkins v. State

• Decision Date: 03 October 1980
• Docket Number: No. 68,68
• Citation: 420 A.2d 270,288 Md. 597
• Parties: Calvin WATKINS a/k/a Vincent Watkins v. STATE of Maryland.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 597

288 Md. 597

420 A.2d 270

Calvin WATKINS a/k/a Vincent Watkins v. STATE of Maryland.

No. 68.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

Oct. 3, 1980.

Gerald A. Kroop, Baltimore, for appellant.

Deborah K. Handel, Asst. Atty. Gen. (Stephen H. Sachs, Atty. Gen., and Michael A. Anselmi, Asst. Atty. Gen., Baltimore, on the brief), for appellee.

Argued before SMITH, DIGGES, ELDRIDGE, COLE and DAVIDSON, JJ.

Reargued before MURPHY, C. J., and SMITH, DIGGES, ELDRIDGE, COLE, DAVIDSON and RODOWSKY, JJ.

DIGGES, Judge.

In the criminal cause now before us, petitioner Calvin Watkins challenges the denial of his pretrial motion to suppress evidence obtained as a result of police activity which he asserts violated his right under the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Since we conclude that the complained of police conduct was not an impermissible intrusion into the petitioner's personal security, we shall affirm the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals upholding his conviction for the illegal possession of a controlled dangerous substance.

The pertinent facts, agreed upon by the parties, can be succinctly stated. On February 12, 1978, at approximately 4:40 p. m., Police Officer John McEntee received an official radio transmission directing him to go to the 2100 block of Barclay Street in Baltimore City to assist an unidentified foot patrolman who was "in pursuit of two suspects reported to be armed ...." ¹ As Officer McEntee proceeded to that location in his marked cruiser, he overheard another transmission from the policeman on foot reporting that he had lost sight of the two suspects in the vicinity of intersection of 21st and Barclay Streets. At the time of this second broadcast Officer McEntee, being within one block of that intersection, slowed his cruiser and observed 30 to 50 people throughout the 2000 block of Barclay, among whom were the petitioner and an unidentified person standing with him. As the police car approached, the petitioner's companion yelled "run, police" and Watkins in response did flee by running into and through an alley. Officer McEntee immediately alighted from his vehicle and while calling out several times for the runner to stop, gave chase for a distance of some three blocks where, upon overtaking petitioner, the officer attempted to grab him from behind. At that point, Watkins turned and struck Officer McEntee in the mouth with the back of his hand, and the struggle that followed culminated with the subduing of the petitioner in a prone position on the ground. While in that posture, when Watkins attempted to reach for his right lower leg, Officer McEntee patted the exterior of the sock area and identified the soft, pliable object within it not to be a weapon. Petitioner was then placed under arrest for assaulting the officer and the more intensive search which followed produced from his sock a brown paper bag containing 73 glassine packets of what was later determined to be heroin.

As it turned out, Mr. Watkins was not one of the armed suspects who had evaded the foot patrolman. He was, however, tried, convicted and sentenced in the Criminal Court of Baltimore (Arabian, J.) for the illegal possession of heroin in sufficient quantity to indicate an intent to distribute that drug. The conviction was obtained only after a pretrial motion to suppress and exclude the heroin was denied, a ruling Watkins claimed on his appeal to the Court of Special Appeals constituted reversible error. That court, in an opinion written by Judge Liss, after determining that "(t)hese facts, as articulated by the police officer, were sufficient to raise a rational inference that the appellant may have been 'connected with criminal activity' ", concluded "that there was legal justification for the (Terry ²) stop," and affirmed his conviction and sentence. Watkins v. State, 42 Md.App. 442, 446, 400 A.2d 1143, 1146 (1979). We granted certiorari.

In urging that this Court reverse the judgment, the petitioner advances two reasons why the heroin was impermissibly seized, either of which, he asserts, would dictate that it could not be used as evidence against him. First, Watkins argues that Officer McEntee did not possess sufficient articulable facts which authorized the investigatory stop of the petitioner. And, second, he contends that even assuming that the officer had the requisite predicate for detaining Watkins, it is unreasonable under the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution to use physical force to effectuate the stop. Petitioner rationalizes that if either of these contentions is true, then his assault of the officer was justified, ³ and his arrest for this crime was invalid, which in turn makes the article seized inadmissible in evidence since it was "fruit of the poisonous tree." E. g., Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963).

We begin our analysis of the contentions raised by the petitioner with an examination of the principles established by the Supreme Court of the United States in the landmark case of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), which articulates the bedrock constitutional law largely determinative of the issues in this case. ⁴ In Anderson v. State, 282 Md. 701, 387 A.2d 281 (1978), this Court summarized the applicable law announced by the Supreme Court in that case:

Terry dealt with the very narrow question of whether it is always unreasonable for a policeman to seize a person and subject him to a limited search for weapons when there is no probable cause to arrest him. Answering that question in the negative, the Court preliminarily rejected the notion that such investigatory detentions were not governed by the fourth amendment to the Federal Constitution. The Court observed that "whenever a police officer accosts an individual and restrains his freedom to walk away, he has 'seized' that person," and that exploration of the outer surfaces of a person's clothing is a "serious intrusion upon the sanctity of the person ... and ... not to be undertaken lightly." The central inquiry is "the reasonableness in all the circumstances of the particular governmental invasion of a citizen's personal security." In determining whether the intrusion was justified at its inception, "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." The reasonableness of an intrusion is to be assessed against an objective standard-whether "the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search 'warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief' that the action taken was appropriate." (Anderson v. State, supra at 704-5, 387 A.2d at 283 (citations omitted).)

Though the Terry court did not specifically rule on the constitutional propriety of an investigative seizure, Terry v. Ohio, supra, 392 U.S. at 19 n. 16, 88 S.Ct. at 1878, but see id. at 32-33, 88 S.Ct. at 1885-1886 (J. Harlan's concurring opinion), decisions subsequent to Terry have left no doubt as to the constitutionality of such detentions, given proper circumstances. See Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47, 50, 99 S.Ct. 2637, 2640, 61 L.Ed.2d 357 (1979); United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 878, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 2578, 45 L.Ed.2d 607 (1975). "(T)he real thrust of Terry is directed at instances in which there is reasonable suspicion that someone is about to commit or has just committed a crime." Anderson v. State, supra, 282 Md. at 706, 387 A.2d at 284. Thus, it is the manifest need for "necessarily swift action predicated upon the on-the-spot observations of the officer on the beat," Terry v. Ohio, supra, 392 U.S. at 20, 88 S.Ct. at 1879, reasonably creating in the mind of the officer "some quantam of individualized suspicion," United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543, 560, 96 S.Ct. 3074, 3084, 49 L.Ed.2d 1116 (1976); Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 99 S.Ct. 1391, 59 L.Ed.2d 660 (1979), that must be balanced against "the individual's right to personal security free from arbitrary interference by law officers." United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, supra, 422 U.S. at 878, 95 S.Ct. at 2579. See Brown v. Texas, supra, 443 U.S. at 50-51, 99 S.Ct. at 2640-2641; Delaware v. Prouse, supra, 440 U.S. at 654-55, 99 S.Ct. at 1396-1397.

Neither the Terry opinion, nor the Supreme Court decisions since that case, spell out with any precision the factors to be analyzed in determining whether the police officer had knowledge of specific and articulable facts justificatory of the detention of an individual on less than probable cause. The federal and state courts that have applied Terry, however, have commonly looked to several criteria in attempting to resolve whether the police officer had the requisite reasonable suspicion. This Court, for instance, in Anderson v. State, supra, 282 Md. at 707 n. 5, 387 A.2d at 285 n. 5, concluded that the character of the area, the temporal and spacial proximity of the stop to the situs of the crime, and the appearance and conduct of the suspect were relevant in adjudging reasonable suspicion. Similarly, in United States v. Wright, 565 F.2d 486 (8th Cir. 1977), cert. denied, 435 U.S. 974, 98 S.Ct. 1621, 56 L.Ed.2d 67 (1978), a case factually akin to the one at bar, the court relied on the following circumstances in determining that the police conduct was valid: a radio dispatch reporting that a robbery had just been committed, the proximity of the suspect to the reported crime, and the suspicious conduct of the defendant upon awareness of the police presence. Id. at 489. Accord, Franklin v. United States, 382 A.2d 20, 22 (D.C.1978), cert. denied, 440 U.S. 948, 99 S.Ct. 1428, 59 L.Ed.2d 637 (1979); Project, Eighth Annual Review of Criminal Procedure: United States Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals 1977-78, 67 Geo.L.J. 317, 354-55 (1978)...