Defendant was stopped for three minutes after an officer passed by and smelled marijuana, and stopped to talk to him and others. After a search of the trunk revealed nothing, defendant fled and dropped a gun in flight. The reasonable suspicion for the stop didn\u2019t completely dissipate by the time flight occurred just because the search came up empty. United States v. Lima, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 137001 (D. V.I. September 25, 2012)*:<\/p>\n
For the Court to enforce such an arbitrary and artificial end to a brief investigatory encounter that had just begun, as urged by Defendant Lima, and which suffered from no Fourth Amendment infirmity at its inception, would prevent the officers from doing their job\u2014to assess the circumstances in light of their knowledge and experience and determine whether and how they should continue their investigation. The brevity of the Terry stop and the minimally intrusive nature of the investigation confirms that the officers “diligently pursued a means of investigation that was likely to confirm or dispel their suspicions quickly ….” Sharpe, 470 U.S. at 686. The approximately three minute interaction between the police officers and the three men fits entirely within Terry’s admonition that an investigatory stop be brief. Cf. United States v. Frost, 999 F.2d 737, 740-42 (3d Cir. 1993) (holding that a seizure lasting eighty minutes was acceptable under the circumstances, where the police had acted diligently). Defendant’s attempt to parse an already brief and entirely legitimate investigatory stop into even smaller segments defies rationality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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