Opinion ID: 2274559
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Police may perceive either the drugs, or the act of suppression.

Text: Here, we also parse our statement in Pennewell that the State could not prove tampering, because the drugs were visible and immediately retrievable. The police must be able to retrieve the evidence immediately, as described above. A police officer may frustrate a defendant's attempt to suppress evidence, by perceiving the evidence or the defendant during the act of suppression. In Delgado, a case where police officers saw a defendant shaking [19] and making a throwing motion during pursuit [20] before recovering discarded drugs, the defendant did not commit the crime of tampering. In Pennewell, we reversed a tampering conviction, where a police officer saw drugs fall, although he did not see the defendant make a throwing motion. [21] Whether the police perceived the evidence or perceived the defendant's movement during the act of suppression did not affect either the police's recovery of the evidence, or the court's decision. The rule we adopt here also comports with cases where this Court has affirmed tampering convictions. In Fletcher v. State, [22] we affirmed the defendant's conviction when he hid evidence from police in a car's glove compartment and side door pocket. After pulling Fletcher over for a traffic infraction, the police officer did not see him hide evidence, but discovered it after searching the car. Although the evidence was immediately retrievable, the police officer did not perceive the evidence or the defendant, during the act of suppression. Fletcher highlights an important distinction between the facts in Anderson and in this case. In Anderson, the police officers perceived a potential concealment after the defendant had completed his act of suppression  akin to the facts in Fletcher. Anderson hoped that the police would fail to discover a purse, and his suppression was completed: nothing remained for him to do to prevent prosecutors from using the evidence in an official proceeding. Here, however, Harris still had the drugs in his mouth so that the inchoate suppression was still in progress when Connick contemporaneously perceived the bag of marijuana in Harris's mouth. Harris could not leave the evidence in his mouth but would need to remove and conceal it or, as the indictment suggests, swallow the plastic baggie and its contents in order to meet the suppression element of § 1269.