Opinion ID: 2403988
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: the alleged withdrawal of consent

Text: According to the accounts of all three witnesses who described the search, Burton's acquiescence in it, by the time the encounter ended, was at best reluctant. Detective Oxendine testified that Burton stuck his hand in his jacket pocket and turned away; he looked as if he was trying to hide something... between the seat and the wall of the bus. According to Ms. Oxendine, Burton turned toward the window as if he was trying to take [the contraband] out right before Ronnie [Hairston] found it. To a lay observer not schooled in nice legal distinctions, this would surely come across as action designed to thwart a search, not to continue to consent to it. We are supposed to be earthy rather than academic in approaching these questions, and to display hardnosed realism too. See, e.g., Gomez v. United States, 597 A.2d 884, 889 (D.C.1991) (citation omitted). This earthy approach should be available to both parties to the controversyto defendants as well as to prosecutors and detectives. Common sense tells us that trying to hide something does not constitute, nor is it consistent with, continued consent to a search in which the incriminating item sought to be concealed would inevitably be found. Detective Hairston's account is likewise hard to reconcile with the notion that Burton was still freely consenting to a search which, if successfully completed, would all but inevitably land him in the penitentiary for many years to come. According to Hairston, Burton grabbed his jacket as Hairston was about to search him. Burton also looked away, out of the window. Burton's hand was in his jacket until Hairston asked him to remove it, which Burton did. At this point, according to the detective, he had seen a bulge, and he was thinking about my safety because I thought there might be a weapon in his pocket. The idea that Burton might be about to pull a revolver or other weapon on an officer cannot easily be squared with the perception that he was at that time making or adhering to a free and unconstrained choice to submit to a search. To adopt the sensible words spoken on the subject by the trial judge shortly after he heard the evidence, I think that if a ... police officer believes that someone who has previously given consent is now going actually for a weapon that potentially is going to be used to injure the officers, I think conceivably that even lends more credence to the conclusion that the officer should have known that consent was no longer being given. Burton testified even more directly that he was trying to communicate to the detective his objection to the proposed search: Q Well did you just sit there and let him search you? Or did you move away? A ... I moved toward the window like this. Q And when you made that movement, those movements, in your mind were you telling him that you wanted to be searched? Or telling him that you didn't want to be searched? A Telling him I didn't want to be searched. [4] Given these accounts provided by the participants, it is pretty obvious that by the time Detective Hairston told him to take his hand out of his pocket, Burton did not want Hairston to search him. His continued consent to the search, if such continued consent existed, was not the product of an essentially free and unconstrained choice by its maker. Schneckloth, supra, 412 U.S. at 225, 93 S.Ct. at 2047. If Burton nevertheless consented, he did so because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he had no choice, and that the consequences of not consenting would be so unfavorable to him that he had better submit to Hairston's wishes, even if this meant that the detective would find the crack. I do not read either the trial judge's findings or the majority opinion as holding that Burton had any other motivation for his continued consent, and I do not see how any reasonable trier of fact could come up with any explanation other than apprehension of consequences even worse than the discovery of the cocaine. Nevertheless, the trial judge held, and my colleagues agree, that the search was legal because Burton initially consented to it and because he never unequivocally withdrew his consent. I now turn to these issues.