A ShotSpotter alert led to defendant’s stop in a high-crime area late at night. On the totality, there was no reasonable suspicion for defendant’s stop. Therefore, his flight after the stop began didn’t end the inquiry. United States v. Carter, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 121181 (D.D.C. July 10, 2020):
The government’s attempt to analogize this case to United States v. Brown, 334 F.3d 1161, 357 U.S. App. D.C. 339 (D.C. Cir. 2003), is also unpersuasive. It is true that, as in Brown, the officers here had somewhat more than a generalized area where the gunshots may have occurred: the ShotSpotter alert indicated that the shots occurred in the vicinity of 4905 Nash Street NE. Tr. at 17:22-18:12; cf. Brown, 334 F.3d at 1162. But Brown had a number of facts, absent here, that render the case distinguishable. First, the officers in Brown were responding to a 911 call with many specific details. The caller, the resident of an apartment building, reported that there had been a fight in an adjacent parking lot, that shots had been fired, and that one of the shots had shattered her child’s window. Brown, 334 F.3d at 1162. When officers arrived on the scene, there were only two cars in the parking lot. Id. The court stated that the specificity of the report—”that gunshots had been fired from the lot into the window of a child’s bedroom”—”enhanced the probability that criminal activity had been committed, or was being committed, by someone inside one of the only two occupied cars in the lot” and thus justified a Terry stop. Id. at 1165. In contrast, here, police had less specificity about where the shots took place—they had only a radius of unspecified size from the ShotSpotter alert centering on 4905 Nash Street NE. See ShotSpotter Report; Tr. at 16:5-6 (“ShotSpotter gives a radius of where the sounds of gunshots are heard.”). And there is no persuasive evidence that Carter and his companions were the only people in the area of the shots. Furthermore, in Brown, one of the occupants of defendant’s car exhibited “peculiar” behavior—exiting the vehicle, watching the officers for a while, then disappearing—that was sufficient to “raise suspicion or concern.” Id. at 1167. Here, the government has been able to point to no behavior beyond Carter and his companions simply walking in a residential neighborhood on New Year’s Eve, which is certainly not out of the ordinary. See Delaney, 955 F.3d at 1086.
Beyond the gunshots, the government also points to the fact that the incident occurred in a high-crime area at night. Tr. at 9:22-25. While presence in a high-crime area can be a relevant factor, it is “insufficient by itself to amount to reasonable suspicion.” United States v. Johnson, 212 F.3d 1313, 1316, 341 U.S. App. D.C. 289 (D.C. Cir. 2000) (citing Wardlow, 528 U.S. at 124). Nor can the time of day, though relevant, establish reasonable suspicion on its own. Jones, 142 F. Supp. 3d at 59 (citing Brown, 334 F.3d at 1165). On their own or together, these three factors—the gunshots, the high-crime area, and the time of day—are insufficient to create individualized “suspicion that the particular individual being stopped … was engaged in wrongdoing.” Delaney, 955 F.3d at 1087 (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). “The demand for specificity in the information upon which police action is predicated … is the central teaching of [the Supreme Court’s] jurisprudence, and specificity is precisely what is missing here.” Id. (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 21 n.18 (cleaned up)). The Court therefore concludes that Officers Dabney and Kelly lacked reasonable suspicion as to Carter at the time of the initial interaction, when the officers stopped Carter and his companions on the street.
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)