Opinion ID: 2270874
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Consensual Encounter or Investigatory Stop

Text: We agree with the intermediate appellate court that Officer Lewis's initial questioning of the petitioner was not an investigative stop, but rather a consensual encounter or accosting. As Swift, 393 Md. at 151, 899 A.2d at 874, instructs us, a consensual encounter does not implicate the Fourth Amendment because the individual with whom the police are interacting is free to leave at any time. The Court of Special Appeals analyzed the petitioner's encounter with Officer Lewis as follows: When the police officers asked [the petitioner] if he lived at the house in whose shadows he was standing, [the petitioner] could not have reasonably believed that the police were doing anything more than making a routine inquiry. The officers' inquiry was a request for basic information, not an order. Officer Lewis yelled the question because of the distance between the officers and [the petitioner], and the officers began to walk toward [the petitioner] only after he did not respond to their questions, presumably to find out why he had not.... In sum, [the petitioner] was not seized by the officers but merely was accosted at the point at which the officers began to approach him. Thus, this Court need not consider whether Officer Lewis had reasonable articulable suspicion of criminal activity when he decided to approach the petitioner after the petitioner twice failed to respond to his question. There was no investigative stop of the petitioner under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968).