Opinion ID: 4530342
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Entry onto Private Property

Text: In issuing its verdict, the trial court stated that it was “not prepared to assume that” the entirety of the sidewalk on the south side of N Street SE, including the brick border closest to the street, “is public property.”5 Instead, it determined that when “Mr. Wicks crossed the sidewalk and approached the will call window” on July 1, 2017, he “entered unlawfully onto the private property of the Washington Nationals.” Although the trial court was rightly skeptical that the entire width of this city sidewalk was “private property,”6 we see no evidentiary basis for the court’s 5 This statement was consistent with the trial court’s earlier determination, when rejecting Mr. Wicks’s motion for a judgment of acquittal, that there was “sufficient proof that even if the brick portion of the sidewalk [closest to the street] is public property when he leaves the brick portion and crosses onto the concrete portion and then goes by the will call office he is on Nationals’ property.” 6 For many years, the general “rule in the District of Columbia” has been “that the sidewalks of the District of Columbia extend from the curb bounding the street to the building line . . . .” Gittleson v. Robinson, 61 A.2d 635, 637 (D.C. 1948) (emphasis added); cf. Morgan v. District of Columbia, 476 A.2d 1128, 1129–30 (D.C. 1984) (demonstrators arrested for unlawful assembly after moving from public sidewalk to private driveway). 10 conclusion that a portion of the sidewalk by the will call office belonged to the Washington Nationals. Officer Clarke, the government’s only witness, never delineated only some portion of the sidewalk outside the stadium as belonging to the Washington Nationals (and he never described the sidewalk as being made of two different materials). To the contrary, he testified that the entirety of the sidewalk on the south side of N Street SE was the “property of the Washington Nationals.” We thus evaluate whether this testimony can sustain the first element of the crime of unlawful entry. The court acknowledged that there was a question whether Officer Clarke was “competent to testify about the boundaries of Nationals Park.” Nevertheless, the court concluded that it could rely on Officer Clarke’s testimony about what constituted the property of the Washington Nationals by analogizing to a homeowner who, in lieu of presenting expert testimony, may testify about the valuation of their property. We do not disagree with the general proposition that a property owner may testify about the boundaries of their property. But even the testimony of a property owner may not be relied upon to prove unlawful entry where, as here, that testimony fails to establish that the owner—or, as in this case, their employee—has an actual basis of knowledge. Cf. Joiner-Die v. United States, 899 A.2d 762, 765 (D.C. 2006) (“A witness is competent to testify only about those matters of which 11 he/she has personal knowledge.”); cf. also Harrison v. United States, 76 A.3d 826, 841 n.19 (D.C. 2013) (acknowledging that “personal knowledge includes inferences and opinions, so long as they are grounded in personal observations and experience” (internal quotation marks omitted)). The record contains no evidence that the Washington Nationals provided Officer Clarke with information about the boundaries of its property. Although the trial court referred in passing to Officer Clarke’s “on the job training,” Officer Clarke did not testify that he had learned about the boundaries of the Washington Nationals property while working. He never indicated he had previously issued any barring notices or made any unlawful entry arrests, much less testified that his job regularly included “enforcing the boundaries of the park” as the government represents in its brief. Although Officer Clarke broadly described his job as performing “whatever . . . assignments the Washington Nationals have that are police related,” when he specified what those assignments were, he explained they largely related to crowd control—“handl[ing] disorderly[ attendees,] . . . facilitat[ing] the egress and ingress of patrons coming in to watch the ballgame.” Further, Officer Clarke did not testify that he had a reliable, personal basis of knowledge that the sidewalk belonged to the Washington Nationals. He admitted 12 that he had not seen any official surveys of the Washington Nationals property and that he had relied exclusively on some unidentified “documents posted online.” The government represents in its brief that Officer Clarke “confirmed this property line on the DCRA website,” but his testimony about where online he had seen these documents was equivocal at best: after asking for a moment to “recollect” his source of information, he testified, “I want to say DCRA.” And when asked whether whatever he had seen online “show[ed] how many feet from the abutment of the building belong[] to the Washington Nationals,” he again testified he could not “recall.” The government did not seek to rehabilitate Officer Clarke on this point on redirect and did not seek to put any exhibits into evidence to substantiate the Washington Nationals’ ownership of the sidewalk.7 7 At oral argument, the government directed attention away from the DCRA website, observing that “the DDOT [District Department of Transportation] website actually has a mapping tool which you can determine [property lines].” But the government never elicited evidence from Officer Clarke that he might have looked at the DDOT website, nor asked the trial court to judicially notice any information contained on the DDOT (or any other government) website. See Bostic v. District of Columbia, 906 A.2d 327, 332 (D.C. 2006) (“[W]e may take judicial notice of laws, statutes, and other matters of public record.”). We note that, had the government asked the trial court to judicially notice the records generated by the DDOT mapping tool, it appears that the evidence would not have supported the government’s case. This tool, Atlas Plus, developed by the District’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, indicates that the property line of the Washington Nationals stadium along N Street SE is coextensive with the footprint of the physical structure and does not extend into the sidewalk. See Atlas All-in-One, District Dep’t of Transp., https://ddot.dc.gov/page/atlas-all-one 13 In its verdict, the trial court commended Officer Clarke for “candidly . . . admit[ing] the limits of his knowledge.” But these “limits” revealed that Officer Clarke provided no reliable foundation for his assertion that the sidewalk on the south side of N Street SE, next to the stadium, was owned by the Washington Nationals. Accordingly, these “limits” rendered the government’s evidence insufficient as to the first element of unlawful entry—entry on to private property.