Opinion ID: 765858
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Seizure of Passports

Text: 157 After a pre-trial hearing, the District Court denied El-Gabrowny's motion to suppress the forged passports on the ground, inter alia, that their seizure was justified under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968). See United States v. El-Gabrowny, 876 F. Supp. 495, 498-500 (S.D.N.Y. 1994). El-Gabrowny contends the passports should not have been admitted in evidence at trial because their seizure violated prohibitions of the Fourth Amendment. 158 Under Terry, to determine whether police officers were justified in frisking a temporarily detained person to see if he is carrying weapons, we apply an objective standard: would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search 'warrant [an officer] of reasonable caution in the belief' that the action taken was appropriate? Terry, 392 U.S. at 21-22. Before carrying out a stop and frisk for weapons, [t]he officer need not be absolutely certain that the individual is armed; the issue is whether a reasonably prudent [officer] in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his safety or that of others was in danger. Id. at 27. 159 Several specific and articulable facts available to the officers at the time of the seizure amply justified their conduct. See id. at 21. The FBI had learned, upon searching the debris at the site of the explosion at the World Trade Center, that the exploded vehicle had been rented by Mohammad Salameh, whose New York driver's license showed as his residence the address of El-Gabrowny's apartment in Brooklyn. On March 4, 1993, agents obtained a warrant to search the apartment for explosives and related devices. Also on that day, news of Salameh's arrest was widely broadcast. See El-Gabrowny, 876 F. Supp. at 497. Before agents entered El-Gabrowny's apartment, two officers waited outside in vehicles and watched El-Gabrowny, who had left his building and was walking down the street. As agents entered the building to conduct the search, El-Gabrowny, whose identity was known to the agents, turned and started to walk back toward the building at an accelerated pace, his hands thrust in the pockets of his jacket. Id. at 497. Upon observing this, the officers approached El-Gabrowny, identified themselves as police officers, removed his hands from his pockets, and tried to place his hands against a wall to frisk him. El-Gabrowny resisted. One officer felt a firm rectangular object in El-Gabrowny's pocket that he believed might be a plastic explosive. El-Gabrowny then struck both agents and was arrested for assaulting the agents. The officers removed the object from El-Gabrowny's pocket, and found that it was an envelope containing the fraudulent passports. Id. at 498. 160 In light of these facts, the agents were justified under Terry in stopping El-Gabrowny and frisking him for weapons to protect their own safety and that of the agents conducting the search. It was reasonable for the officers to suspect that the firm rectangular object in El-Gabrowny's pocket might be an explosive device, given the use of explosives at the World Trade Center bombing and the fact that the warrant for the apartment covered explosives. 161 In any event, the officers were authorized to arrest El-Gabrowny for his assaults on them. His arrest for the assault would inevitably have led to the discovery and seizure of the passports that were in his pocket upon a search of his person incident to that arrest. See United States v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 218, 229 (1973); Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 440, 448 (1984) (inevitable discovery). 12