DC: When defendant assaults officer during illegal patdown, acquittal not the remedy for a Fourth Amendment violation

Defendant was stopped without legal justification, and one thing led to another and he assaulted the officer. Acquittal was not an appropriate remedy for what was a separate crime despite the Fourth Amendment violation. Crossland v. United States, 32 A.3d 1005 (D.C. 2011):

In his post-trial Motion for Judgment of Acquittal, appellant argued that “because Officer Baldwin’s behavior violated his [Fourth Amendment] rights,” the trial court “should consider sanctioning the Government” by entering a judgment of acquittal. Relying on Mapp v. Ohio, appellant argues that the trial court erred in denying his motion, contending that “the only way to deter the MPD police policy of ‘aggressive high visibility patrol,’ … is to remove the incentive” for police officers to disregard constitutional rights. We discern no reason to doubt (and the government does not dispute) that Officer Baldwin’s conduct — forcibly searching appellant when, as the officer acknowledged, appellant was doing nothing unlawful — violated appellant’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. However, application of the sanction established by Mapp (the so-called “exclusionary rule”) has “been limited to cases in which the prosecution seeks to use the fruits of an illegal search or seizure against the victim of police misconduct.” Artis v. United States, 802 A.2d 959, 967 (D.C. 2002) (quoting United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 910, 104 S. Ct. 3405, 82 L. Ed. 2d 677 (1984)). This case did not involve the seizure of evidence, and the authority that appellant cited did not require or authorize the trial court to grant appellant’s request for a judgment of acquittal. Moreover, as the trial court recognized, the APO statute “prohibits forceful resistance even if the officer’s conduct is unlawful.” Dolson v. United States, 948 A.2d 1193, 1202 (D.C. 2008) (explaining that the rationale for this rule is to “deescalate the potential for violence which exists whenever a police officer encounters an individual in the line of duty”) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). The trial court did not err in denying appellant’s motion.