Opinion ID: 202406
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Implausible testimony: observations leading to the vehicle stop

Text: 45 As Henderson argued at length before the district court and repeats here, even if Kominsky had a legal basis for pulling Alford over, it is implausible that the events before the stop unfolded as he testified. According to his testimony, Kominsky pulled behind a blue Nissan at the intersection of Plain Street and Waverly Park Avenue, which Kominsky testified was in Brockton, 40, 50 yards from the West Bridgewater town line. He said that the Nissan was going slower than the speed limit allowed, between 20 and 25 miles per hour. Kominsky further testified at the first suppression hearing that while driving through West Bridgewater he saw the Nissan stray across the yellow center line at least twice — and maybe as many as five times; typed the Nissan's license plate into his laptop computer (looking at the keyboard as he did); used the license plate number to search the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles database, which required the laptop to initiate a cellular phone call; waited at a minimum, 20 seconds for the computer to process the search (a search that he said often took several minutes to produce results); and, while still in West Bridgewater, received a computer report indicating that Alford, the registered driver of the car, had a suspended license. Kominsky testified that he decided to stop the Nissan while he was still in West Bridgewater, at the intersection of Plain Street and Belmont Street, but that he actually initiated the stop in East Bridgewater, because he was waiting for a moment when he would have a tactical advantage. 4 According to the undisputed testimony of Henderson's investigator, it takes no more than 49 seconds to travel at 20-25 miles per hour from the intersection of Plain Street and Waverly Park Avenue in Brockton, where Kominsky said he first saw Alford's car, to the intersection of Plain and Belmont Streets. 46 Everyone agrees that Alford was perfectly sober at the time of the stop. The uncontested evidence is that she was driving especially carefully because she knew that she was being followed by a police officer. Yet, according to Kominsky's testimony, he observed Alford drive the two left tires of her car across the center line of a straight street between two and five times — over a distance of three tenths of a mile. At the same time, Kominsky said, he was conducting a computer search that often took several minutes to complete. All of this, according to Kominsky, happened in no more than 49 seconds. The idea that Kominsky could observe all of this in such a short time verges on physical impossibility. 47 Attempting to blunt Henderson's demonstration of this implausibility, the government argues that Alford's testimony about the minutes leading to the stop was equally implausible. Alford said that at some point while she and Henderson were still in Brockton, Kominsky began following her. Alford testified that Kominsky was sitting at an intersection. When her car approached, he activated his cruiser's flashing lights. She stopped to allow Kominsky to pull out ahead of her, but Kominsky flashed his bright lights and then signaled for her to go ahead of him. After she passed by, she testified, Kominsky began following her. Kominsky followed for several minutes — she thought it could have been as long as twenty minutes, but stated that she was not keeping track of the time and did not know — and then pulled her to the side of the road. 48 In the government's view, Alford's statement that Kominsky may have been following her for as long as twenty minutes somehow shows Kominsky to be reliable about the minutes before the vehicle stop. This argument fails. Alford's testimony about the number of minutes Kominsky was following her was self-consciously uncertain. She only professed to be sure that Kominsky was following her for a fairly long time. Alford's testimony that Kominsky was following her for longer than he said relates a more plausible sequence of events than Kominsky's testimony. If Kominsky actually saw what he professed to see, it is virtually certain that he was following Alford for significantly longer than 49 seconds, which would mean that Alford's statement that Kominsky began following her while she was still some distance from West Bridgewater may have been correct. Indeed, the district court noted as an aside at sentencing that Kominsky might have been off on the times in his testimony about the minutes before the vehicle stop. 49