UT: Defendant’s consent to a patdown for weapons validly led to plain feel of syringe

Defendant’s consent to a patdown for weapons validly led to plain feel of syringe. State v. Burdick, 2014 UT App 34, 2014 Utah App. LEXIS 33 (February 13, 2014):

[*P17] While Defendant argues that it would have been impossible for Detective Warren to identify the object in his pocket as a syringe from a mere pat down, Detective Warren needed only a reasonable belief that the object he discovered was a syringe that could be used as a weapon to investigate further. See United States v. Harris, 313 F.3d 1228, 1238 (10th Cir. 2002); see also State v. Ellis, 2012 UT App 272, ¶ 8, 287 P.3d 471 (“[T]he allowable scope of a Terry frisk is determined by the reasonableness of the officer’s belief that an object might be a weapon or might contain one, not by the degree of his certainty that an object is or contains a weapon.”). We are not convinced that a syringe is so nondescript that Detective Warren could not have reasonably believed he had discovered a syringe through a pat down. See, e.g., State v. Hunter, 615 So. 2d 727, 734 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1993) (“We conclude that the officer was justified in taking the item out of [the defendant’s] pocket as a result of a legitimate frisk for weapons and the officer’s reasonable belief that the object she felt was a syringe that could be used as a weapon.”); State v. Eells, 696 P.2d 564, 565 (Or. Ct. App. 1985) (observing that the officer discovered a syringe in the defendant’s pocket while conducting a frisk for weapons); Moore v. Commonwealth, 487 S.E.2d 864, 866, 869 (Va. Ct. App. 1997) (concluding that an officer’s Terry frisk, during which the officer “detected and removed from [the defendant’s] pocket an unsheathed syringe,” was reasonable under the circumstances); see also Dickerson, 508 U.S. at 376 (“The very premise of Terry, after all, is that officers will be able to detect the presence of weapons through the sense of touch and Terry upheld precisely such a seizure.”).

[*P18] Given Detective Warren’s testimony relating his extensive experience conducting pat downs over seven years of law enforcement work, we are not persuaded by Defendant’s argument that it would have been impossible for Detective Warren to identify the syringe from a pat down without exceeding the bounds of Terry. And once Detective Warren identified the syringe under these circumstances—given the discovery of a knife under Defendant’s leg, Defendant’s furtive movements, and the presence of drugs and the other weapons in the room—he was justified in removing the object from Defendant’s pocket to ascertain whether what he believed to be a syringe had an attached needle or was otherwise a weapon that could harm him or another. See Hunter, 615 So. 2d at 734.