Opinion ID: 2175904
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The nature of the issues.

Text: The District has not contended, either in the trial court or on appeal, that the police had probable cause to search J.M., or even articulable suspicion to detain him, prior to the discovery of cocaine on his person. Its defense of the trial court's decision must therefore stand or fall on the correctness of the judge's holding that the search and frisk, as well as the interrogation which preceded them, were consensual in character. J.M. contests the validity of the judge's conclusion on two distinct though related grounds. First, he claims that the police interrogation and activities prior to the frisk amounted to a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, in that under all of the circumstances a reasonable person would not have felt free to leave the bus or to decline to respond to police questions. Since the cocaine seized following the frisk was a fruit of what J.M. claims to have been an illegal seizure, he maintains that it ought to have been suppressed. J.M. also contends that, even assuming that there was no initial seizure, the District failed to prove that the search and frisk which followed the initial interrogation were consensual. In support of that contention, J.M. cites his youth, the failure of the police to advise him that he had the right to withhold consent, and what he contends was the intrinsically coercive situation created by the police's initiation of the encounter in the cramped quarters of a bus in the middle of the night and in the presence of numerous passengers to whom any lack of cooperation on J.M.'s part would have been obvious and would have appeared suspicious as well. J.M. maintains that any freedom that he may theoretically have had to withhold his consent to the search was illusory in the context of the realities which confronted him. Although the issues of seizure and consent may in some cases be entirely distinct, they are difficult to differentiate on the present record. The Supreme Court has traditionally held that a seizure occurs when a reasonable person would believe that he or she is not free to leave. See, e.g., Michigan v. Chesternut, 486 U.S. 567, 573, 108 S.Ct. 1975, 1979, 100 L.Ed.2d 565 (1988); cf. California v. Hodari D., ___ U.S. ____, 111 S.Ct. 1547, 1552, 113 L.Ed.2d 690 (1991) (free to disregard the police and go about his business). As the Court pointed out in Bostick, however, the question whether the defendant in that case had been seized turned not so much on whether a reasonable person would have felt free to leave the bus (that freedom having been curtailed in any event, without police participation, by the vehicle's imminent scheduled departure) as on whether such a person would [have felt] free to decline the officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter. Bostick, supra, ___ U.S. at ___, 111 S.Ct. at 2387. Although some differences arguably remain, [4] the question of seizure as refined in Bostick virtually merges into the issue whether the search of J.M.'s property and person was a consensual one. The freedom to ignore the police requests and the freedom not to consent to a search are surely very similar, if not absolutely identical. At the very least, as other courts have recognized, there is a substantial overlap between the two inquiries. United States v. Caballero, 290 U.S.App.D.C. 235, 240, 936 F.2d 1292, 1297 (1991). [5] Given this overlap or near-merger, we focus our inquiry on what we believe to be the definitive issue contested by the parties, namely, whether the search of J.M., in the context of the police activity during the entire encounter, was genuinely consensual and passed muster under the consent search exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. Because we answer that question in the negative, we need not decide whether a Fourth Amendment seizure occurred prior to the frisk.