Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-00-03016/USCOURTS-caDC-00-03016-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Curnell L. Davis
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued November 14, 2000 Decided December 29, 2000

No. 00-3016

United States of America,

Appellee

v.

Curnell L. Davis,

Appellant

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 99cr00222-01)

A. J. Kramer, Federal Public Defender, argued the cause

and filed the briefs for appellant. Gregory L. Poe entered an

appearance.

Suzanne Grealy Curt, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the

cause for appellee. With her on the brief were Wilma A.

Lewis, U.S. Attorney, John R. Fisher, Thomas J. Tourish, Jr.

and Ricardo Nunez, Assistant U.S. Attorneys.

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Before: Williams, Rogers and Tatel, Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge Tatel:

Tatel, Circuit Judge: After police conducting a Terry stopand-frisk discovered a shotgun hidden in his clothing, appellant pled guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon. He

appeals the district court's denial of his motion to suppress,

arguing, among other things, that the court erred by relying

on information police obtained from a citizen 911 call describing a man fleeing the scene of a shooting even though the

government failed to produce a tape of the call. Finding that

appellant waived this argument, and that his similarity to the

911 caller's description and to witness accounts of the shooter

gave police a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" sufficient to

justify the stop, see Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 123

(2000), we affirm.

I

At 11:33 PM on May 31, 1999, a 911 caller reported gunfire

and screaming in the 2300 block of North Capitol Street.

Minutes later, a police dispatcher sent units to 2308 North

Capitol to investigate a "shooting." As police arrived at the

scene, the dispatcher relayed additional citizen reports describing two men, one with blood on his clothes and another

in khaki shorts and a white t-shirt. At 11:40, the police unit

that had arrived at the North Capitol address broadcast its

first account of witness reports. Known as a "lookout," the

broadcast described the suspect as a man on a bike, dressed

all in black, heading north on North Capitol. The unit also

relayed witness reports that the "subjects" were in a fourdoor sedan and that "there seem[ed] to be a grey, small

weapon." Updating the lookout two minutes later, the unit

described the suspect as a "black male, light skinned, black

[unclear], all black, or possibly on a bike, [unclear] carrying a

small weapon."

At midnight, about thirty minutes after the shooting, the

dispatcher reported that "we have a citizen that's on landline,

says the subject is wearing all black, that appears to be

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bly now in the unit block of Channing." Police Lieutenant

Taliaferro and his partner investigated and within thirty

seconds noticed appellant Curnell Davis, a black man wearing

dark blue coveralls, walking with a companion just a block

away from where the midnight 911 caller had reported seeing

the fleeing man. Stopping and frisking Davis, Taliaferro

found a sawed-off shotgun hidden in Davis's clothing. Davis

told the police that "it was [his] boy that got shot" and that he

needed a gun for protection because the neighborhood was so

dangerous. A grand jury indicted Davis for unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. See 18 U.S.C. s 922(g)(1).

Arguing that the police lacked a reasonable suspicion for

the stop-and-frisk, see Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 30 (1968),

Davis moved to suppress both the shotgun and his statements

to the police. In response, the government pointed to Davis's

similarity to the lookouts and to the midnight 911 caller's

description of the man fleeing the crime scene. Although at a

status conference the government apparently promised (the

record does not contain the transcript) to search for the tape

of the midnight 911 call, it failed to produce it at the

evidentiary hearing on the suppression motion. Davis's counsel, however, never mentioned the tape's absence at the

hearing, focusing both his cross-examination of Taliaferro (the

only witness) and his closing argument on ways in which

Davis failed to match the descriptions of the shooting suspect.

Finding Taliaferro's suspicion of Davis reasonable, the district

court denied the suppression motion. Davis pled guilty,

reserving his right to appeal. We review the district court's

findings of fact for clear error and its conclusions of law de

novo. See Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 699 (1996).

II

Investigative stops do not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment if they are based on "reasonable, articulable suspicion"

of criminal conduct. Wardlow, 528 U.S. at 123. Requiring

considerably less than probable cause, Terry stops are constitutional if the police can show a "minimal level of objective

justification." INS v. Delgado, 466 U.S. 210, 217 (1984).

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Davis argues that in defending the constitutionality of the

stop, the government cannot rely on the information supplied

by the midnight 911 caller and relayed by the dispatcher to

the arresting officer because the government failed to produce the tape of the call. In Whiteley v. Warden, Wyo. State

Penitentiary, 401 U.S. 560, 568 (1971), the Supreme Court

held unlawful an arrest based on a radio bulletin where the

government failed to prove that the bulletin was itself based

on probable cause. Later, in United States v. Hensley, 469

U.S. 221 (1985), the Court described Whiteley as standing for

the proposition that "when evidence is uncovered during a

search incident to an arrest in reliance merely on a flyer or

bulletin, its admissibility turns on whether the officers who

issued the flyer possessed probable cause to make the arrest," id. at 231; see also Whiteley, 401 U.S. at 568 ("An

otherwise illegal arrest cannot be insulated from challenge by

the decision of the instigating officer to rely on fellow officers

to make the arrest."). Hensley also extended Whiteley to

reasonable suspicion cases. 469 U.S. at 232. Following

Hensley, in United States v. Cutchin we overturned a district

court's exclusion of a 911 tape, saying: "What the tape itself

revealed went directly to the issue whether the dispatcher

had a reasonable, articulable suspicion, without which [the

officer's] stop of [the suspect's] car might not have been

legal." 956 F.2d 1216, 1217-18 (D.C. Cir. 1992).

Relying on these cases, Davis urges us to find that without

the 911 tape, the dispatcher's report of the call cannot provide

the basis for reasonable suspicion. According to the government, Davis waived this argument because he failed to make

it in the district court. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 12(f) ("Failure by

a party to raise defenses or objections ... at the time set by

the court ... shall constitute waiver thereof."). The government's point is well taken. Not once in the district court did

defense counsel cite Whiteley, Hensley, or Cutchin, much less

the propositions for which they stand, nor did he complain

about the government's failure to produce the 911 tape at the

suppression hearing. Counsel focused his entire argument on

trying to persuade the district court that Davis did not match

the suspect's description. Contrary to Davis's argument, we

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do not consider the filing of a general suppression motion

sufficient to preserve the 911 tape objection for appeal just

because the government bears the burden of proving reasonable suspicion. Neither defense counsel's motion nor his

argument could have given the government notice of the

importance counsel apparently ascribed to the tape.

Given the waiver, we will consider the information provided

by the 911 caller in determining whether the police had a

reasonable suspicion sufficient to justify the stop. For starters, we agree with Davis that the call, by itself, provides

insufficient justification. In Florida v. J.L., 120 S.Ct. 1375

(2000), the Supreme Court considered the validity of a Terry

stop based on an anonymous tip that a young man standing

on a street corner possessed an illegal weapon. Because

nothing corroborated the anonymous caller's accusation of

criminal activity, the Court held the tip insufficiently reliable

to justify the stop. Id. at 1380. In this case, the midnight

911 caller made no accusation of criminal activity, reliable or

otherwise, reporting only that a subject dressed all in black

appeared to be running from 2308 North Capitol. In view of

J.L., the information supplied by the call falls far short of

what Terry requires.

The 911 call, however, was not Taliaferro's only source of

information, and we have made it clear that "in judging the

reasonableness of the actions of the officer the circumstances

before him are not to be dissected and viewed singly; rather

they must be considered as a whole." United States v. Hall,

525 F.2d 857, 859 (D.C. Cir. 1976). Taliaferro knew that a

shooting had just occurred at 2308 North Capitol and that

witnesses had described the shooter as a black male dressed

all in black heading north from the crime scene. He also

knew that a man matching the description of the suspect in

two respects--his clothing and his approximate location (just

north of 2308 North Capitol)--had been seen fleeing the

crime scene. So when Taliaferro saw Davis, he saw a man

heading away from the nearby crime scene who not only

matched the 911 caller's description (according to the district

court, Davis's dark blue coveralls likely appeared black in the

dark) but also matched the police lookouts in yet another

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respect: his race. This case is thus quite like United States

v. Smart, 98 F.3d 1379, 1384 (D.C. Cir. 1997), where we found

sufficient justification for a Terry stop based on the criminal

suspect's sex, race, clothing, and location. Taliaferro had

precisely the same information about the shooting suspect in

this case, albeit aggregated from two different sources. To

be sure, Davis was with a companion, a fact mentioned in

none of the descriptions; he was not riding a bicycle as the

lookouts said he might "possibly" be; nor was a "grey, small

weapon" visible. Setting aside these minor inconsistencies

involving mutable characteristics, however, Davis matched

the lookouts and the 911 caller's description sufficiently to

supply the reasonable suspicion required by Terry.

Davis next argues that Taliaferro's focus on him was unreasonable because the dispatcher provided information about

other suspects: a man with blood on his clothes, another in

khaki shorts, and several individuals in a four-door sedan.

We disagree. Terry requires only that the police have a

reasonable suspicion of the person actually stopped. In

assessing this suspicion, the fact that police have greater

reason to suspect a different person is of course relevant.

But in this case, the best information the police had--eyewitness accounts of the shooter and a man seen fleeing the

scene--pointed to Davis.

While we recognize the need to guard against authorizing

broad police sweeps of an undeniably high crime area, see

Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47, 52 (1979) ("The fact that

appellant was in a neighborhood frequented by [criminals],

standing alone, is not a basis for concluding that appellant

himself was engaged in criminal conduct."), we need not

address that concern here--the police found Davis within a

block of a shooting that occurred just thirty minutes earlier

and Davis matched the primary suspect in several critical

respects. Because Davis makes no independent challenge to

the frisk, the district court's denial of the motion to suppress

is affirmed.

So ordered.

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