“The Fourth Amendment does not have a time limit; it protects individuals from unreasonable seizures, no matter how brief.” The brief detention here wasn’t based on reasonable suspicion and implicated the Fourth Amendment. Commonwealth v. Adams, 2019 Pa. LEXIS 1734 (Mar. 26, 2019):
This discretionary appeal requires the Court to consider once again when an interaction between an ordinary citizen and a law enforcement official ripens from a mere encounter, requiring no level of suspicion, to an investigative detention, which must be supported by reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. We conclude, based on longstanding precedent of this Court and the United States Supreme Court, that the line is crossed when a reasonable person would not feel free to leave, and that a detention effectuated by police in the interest of officer safety is impermissible in the absence of reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. We therefore reverse the decision of the Superior Court and remand the matter to the trial court for proceedings consistent with this Opinion.
. . .
The Commonwealth and the courts below improperly focus, in part, on the duration of the detention that occurred. That the detention was only temporary is irrelevant to our analysis of whether a seizure occurred. An investigative detention, by definition, encompasses only a “brief detention.” See United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 7, 109 S. Ct. 1581, 104 L. Ed. 2d 1 (1989) (“In Terry[], we held that the police can stop and briefly detain a person for investigative purposes if the officer has a reasonable suspicion supported by articulable facts that criminal activity ‘may be afoot,’ even if the officer lacks probable cause.”); Strickler, 757 A.2d at 888 (“The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, including those entailing only a brief detention.”). The Fourth Amendment does not have a time limit; it protects individuals from unreasonable seizures, no matter how brief. See, e.g., United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 880-82, 95 S. Ct. 2574, 45 L. Ed. 2d 607 (1975) (finding an interaction between border patrol officers and individuals in their vehicles during roving-patrol stops and lasting “no more than a minute” to be an investigative detention requiring reasonable suspicion of criminal activity).
The analogies presented for our consideration by the Commonwealth are inapt. An officer’s act of closing the door of a person’s vehicle as the person begins to open it is not similar to a request that a person remove his hands from his pockets, as the latter request in no way constrains a person’s ability to leave the area. Further, although the Commonwealth is correct that the Fourth Amendment allows an officer to order the occupants of a vehicle to exit during a lawful traffic stop, it ignores that a traffic stop is an investigative detention that itself requires reasonable suspicion or probable cause. See Commonwealth v. Chase, 599 Pa. 80, 960 A.2d 108 (Pa. 2008). In Mimms, police initiated a vehicle stop after observing the defendant driving with an expired license plate. The high Court explained that where police have already lawfully and permissibly intruded upon the personal liberty of the vehicle’s occupants by conducting the stop of the vehicle and the driver is lawfully detained, the “additional intrusion” of having the individuals exit the vehicle at the officer’s direction does not constitute a separate seizure and “can only be described as de minimis.” Mimms, 434 U.S. at 111.
The key differentiation of the circumstances in the case at bar is that there was no preexisting permissible intrusion or restraint on Adams’ liberty. The Commonwealth does not contend, and the record does not support a finding, that Adams was already subjected to a lawful investigative detention at the time Officer Falconio closed the vehicle’s door. See Commonwealth’s Brief at 17-21 (asserting that the interaction began as a mere encounter). Thus, unlike in Mimms, Officer Falconio’s action was not an additional de minimus intrusion upon a person who police had already lawfully seized.
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)