Opinion ID: 352420
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: events leading to the detention

Text: 71 The chain of circumstances culminating in appellant's downfall is recounted in the record by Officer Franck himself. He was the only witness at the hearing on appellant's motion to suppress the evidence uncovered after he was brought back to the bank. The officer's testimony on the motion was admitted by stipulation at the ensuing nonjury trial, and the facts to which he testified, as distinguished from the impressions that he derived from those facts, have not been challenged. The events recited herein, then, are as related by the officer at the suppression hearing.
72 From the moment he first laid eyes on appellant, Officer Franck felt that something was odd. It all began one afternoon as the officer commenced a tour of duty inside the bank and spotted appellant 25 feet away 74 awaiting his turn at a teller's window. The officer's attention was drawn to appellant because he was the only person in the bank that didn't look right in the bank. 75 Appellant had a good looking jacket on 76 and was dressed fairly modestly, 77 though his pants were kind of shaggy. 78 Still, to the officer (h)e didn't appear to be right inside the bank. . . . 79 73 As appellant stood in line, Officer Franck noticed that he held a piece of blue paper in his hand. The officer did not know what the paper really was but assumed that it was a check. 80 So, when appellant handed the paper to the teller, and after examination the teller returned it to appellant with an unelucidated reference to a bank official, 81 Officer Franck thought he was watching an effort to cash a check. 82 What I saw in his hand looked like a check, 83 he said; (i)t was Tuesday afternoon. I thought it was an unusual time for somebody to be cashing their pay check. 84 As we know, appellant received no money from the teller, a circumstance that the officer deemed not necessarily criminal, but unusual. 85 74 As appellant left the window, he saw Officer Franck for the first time. We had eye contact for three to five seconds. Maybe six seconds, 86 the officer related; (h)e turned away. From that time on, he avoided any kind of looking at me at all. 87 After speaking briefly to a bank official, 88 and as Officer Franck started moving toward him, . . . (appellant) started walking fast out of the bank, not at the same pace he had been moving 89 so fast, the officer declared, that when I went after the man, I had to trot to catch up with him on the sidewalk. 90 75 It was then that Officer Franck intercepted appellant on the sidewalk. I stopped him, the officer explained, because I thought he was trying to cash a check, and it didn't seem right to me that a man that was trying to cash a check would walk out of the bank without his check being cashed. 91 Appellant unhesitatingly honored Officer Franck's request for a chat. 92 He waited while the officer obtained a form from his scooter and entertained questions while the officer recorded his answers on the form. 93 Asked his name, appellant said William Witherspoon; 94 he also supplied an address 95 and a relative's telephone number, 96 and the officer had no objective basis for doubting any of that information. 97 76 Appellant told the officer that he had no identifying document other than a withdrawal slip that he had filled out in the bank in order to obtain money from his savings account. 98 At the officer's suggestion, he handed over the slip, upon which was written the same name he had previously given 99 and, as the officer was later to testify, he realized that it was a withdrawal slip, yes, sir. 100 Appellant explained that he had mistakenly put his checking-account number instead of his savings-account number on the slip, and thus was unable to effect a withdrawal. 101 Notwithstanding, the officer shortly thereafter subjected appellant to restraint with the proposal that they go back to the bank for further investigation. 102 77 One may comb the officer's detailed narrative of the developments forerunning appellant's in-bank detention for specific and articulable facts . . . reasonably warrant(ing) that intrusion 103 but the effort, I submit, is doomed to failure. To begin with, to stand in line for a bank teller's handling of what appears to be a check is certainly no oddity. The officer had never seen appellant prior to that day; 104 he did not know whether he was a customer of the bank; 105 indeed, he (d)idn't know a thing about him. 106 Nor was there anything exceptional about appellant's attire, as described by the officer, 107 to attract a bystander's special attention. Officer Franck's impression that appellant was the only person in the bank that didn't look right in the bank 108 was no more or less than a subjective hunch of the first order. 109 78 Somewhat more palatable is the officer's mistaken belief that the blue slip in appellant's hand was a check. 110 But the notion that it is unusual for a person to cash his pay check on a Tuesday afternoon 111 strikes me as absurd. People cash checks at banks all the time; a better place to do so is difficult to imagine. And the officer's extrapolation from a blue slip to a check thence to a pay check 112 hardly qualifies as a gem of deduction. I cannot indulge a higher rating to Officer Franck's impression that the fact that the check was not cashed was unusual. 113 A check-cashing effort may founder from any number of difficulties, and the teller's window is a likely place for discovering them. I find it difficult to believe that reasonable-minded people would perceive anything peculiarly criminal about a man that was trying to cash a check (who) walk(s) out of a bank without his check being cashed. 114 79 Much the same must be said for the eye contact, and the subsequent avoid(ance) of such contacts, to which Officer Franck attached importance. 115 Many if not most of us would consider a glance of three to six seconds 116 at a uniformed policeman 117 some distance away 118 enough for any one afternoon. The officer's concern over this aspect of the encounter is akin to a recently-spurned assertion that a driver trailed by a marked police car appeared to be watching us in the rear view mirror and looking around. 119 We dismissed that impression with the admonition that (t)o consider mirror glance as enough for a seizure, however temporary, is to accept the adequacy of 'inarticulate hunches.'  120 Pedestrains, no less than (d) rivers(,) simply do take notice that the police are nearby, 121 and then adore or ignore them as they please. 80 Moreover, the eye-contact episode bears the unmistakable earmark of a hopeless dilemma for appellant. By Officer Franck's own description, after the first sighting nothing transpired that objectively could have augured the likelihood that appellant would have gazed at the officer again. After the transaction at the cashier's window aborted, appellant walked toward the bank officer and then out through the door. Had he turned for one more look at Officer Franck, he would have left himself open to the ever-suspicious policeman's hunch as did the driver in the case just mentioned that appellant was giving him a furtive glance. 81 There was also appellant's brisk exit from the bank, with Officer Franck trot(ting) after him. 122 It may suffice merely to observe that when a patron's business with a bank is at least temporarily at end there is little or no occasion to tarry. To boot, one departing may not unnaturally walk through an exit faster than he previously did in point-to-point movement inside a bank. And it is hardly surprising that Officer Franck had to trot in order to catch up with appellant on the sidewalk since the officer was some distance away when he started. 123 But lest it be thought that appellant's exit had implications as a possible flight from the officer, a few additional remarks are in order. Flight may, of course, have significance in particular contexts, 124 but always there are dangers inherent in unperceptive reliance upon flight as an indicium of guilt, 125 and it is never a reliable indicator of guilt without other circumstances to make its import less ambiguous. 126 The short journey from the bank's interior to the sidewalk outside could hardly be deemed flight in any event, 127 and surely any temptation to do so is removed when it is recalled that appellant unhesitatingly honored the officer's request to halt and thereafter cooperated fully throughout the stop. 128 These contemporaneous circumstances unmistakably negate any different import that otherwise might be thought to follow.
82 This brings us to the episode on the sidewalk, and to Officer Franck's unfruitful call upon appellant for documented personal identification. My colleagues and I are as one in the view that prior to that call the officer did not have sufficient ground to impose any kind of restriction on appellant. 129 What we disagree over is the significance, in the totality of the circumstances, of appellant's inability to produce the required documentation. 130 What now follows is my assessment of that branch of the case. 83 When the subject of identification arose, Officer Franck was under the erroneous impression that appellant had attempted to cash a check in the bank. So, his admitted lack of identifying documents (r)ight away . . . struck (the officer as) funny; 131 (w)hy, he asked himself, does a man go to a bank to cash a check without some sort of identification(?) 132 But the officer's underlying supposition was promptly dispelled. Appellant explained that his purpose had been to withdraw funds from a savings account, and handed the blue withdrawal slip to the officer as proof. 133 The officer examined the slip, recognized it as the one he had seen in the bank and realized just what it was. 134 Thus the theory that until then had so firmly welded the officer's attention on appellant a check-cashing mission in the bank suddenly evaporated. 84 Nonetheless, Officer Franck, in his own words, proceeded to ask (appellant) why he didn't have any identification when he was in the bank. 135 He then was told that appellant had mistakenly written his checking account number on the slip. 136 Still, to the officer, everything was funny: 85 I know my checking account number, and I know my savings account number in my bank. I know they are not alike. 86 I started asking questions. The questions were general questions, but everything was funny. 87 I asked him I said, Mr. Witherspoon, would you mind coming back inside the bank with me, and we will talk to the manager, and if everything is okay, you can go. 137 88 This I read as a statement that the situation seemed funny to Officer Franck because appellant apparently could not distinguish between checking and savings account numbers, an approach, I submit, that succumbs to Terry's requirement of objective unreasonableness. 138 It simply defies experience as well as logic to argue that one is likely to be a criminal just because he cannot remember or differentiate between his bank account numbers. Officer Franck was, however, to voice another concern: 89 I never saw him present any I.D. at the teller's window. When I asked him for I.D. outside (the bank), he stated that he didn't have any. That was another thing that got me to wondering why a man would go into a bank without I.D. 90 I have been in a bank, and they won't accept my badge and I.D. card. I have to have a driver's license, too. 139 And the court echoes much the same theme: 91 (I)t is unusual for an individual to attempt to withdraw money from a personal savings account without being prepared to display some evidence that he owns or controls the account a savings passbook or bank account identification card, if not additional identification as well and, in light of what he had observed in the bank, Officer Franck could reasonably have suspected, when the only identification appellant was able to produce was the disputed transaction slip itself, that he had attempted to withdraw money from someone else's account. 140 92 Both the officer and my colleagues, I think, presume entirely too much. By far the most reasonable deduction from Officer Franck's in-bank observations and appellant's lack of identification was that a bank customer had forgotten to bring along data, including identification, needed to consummate his mission; that he had tried to improvise by recalling his account number; and that, having been informed by the teller that his memory was faulty, he had given up and started home. 93 Everyday experience teaches that we often fall short in even the most elementary precautions for any number of commonplace events. We get caught in showers without umbrellas or raincoats; we get involved in vehicular collisions with seat belts unfastened; and we lock ourselves out of our homes. Of a piece with these mental slips are not infrequent aberrations in documental preparations for the transactions we contemplate. We arrive at supermarkets without our wallets, at shopping centers without our credit cards, and at performances without our pre-purchased tickets; we even drive our cars blissfully unaware that we have neglected to bring along our operator's permits and registration cards. Who among us, including those who pride themselves for care and forethought, has not at some time or another undergone such a lapse? I daresay that appellant, for all Officer Franck knew, could have been but one of a countless number who, for any of many reasons, has arrived at a bank teller's window for a savings withdrawal without any kind of identification whatsoever. 94 So long as man remains as fallible as he is in almost every endeavor imaginable, I cannot accept the episode in suit as the extraordinary event my colleagues believe it was. Much less can I conceive of it as an objective portent of crime in a Nation that does not or, until today's decision, did not require its citizens to carry identification. 141 To an unbiased observer knowing no more than Officer Franck, the simple lack of a passbook, bank card or other documentation of personal identity or account-ownership is all too easily attributable to carelessness, absent-mindedness or sheer ignorance of the mechanics of withdrawal. 142 Moreover, appellant's inability to produce evidence of that sort is too bland a circumstance to connote criminality objectively. If, as my colleagues gratuitously assume, savings withdrawals at the National Bank of Washington are conditioned upon presentation of a particular type of such document, 143 an inability to do so expectably would result merely in the bank's refusal to permit the sought-after withdrawal. 144 That consequence hardly comports with the sophistication normally associated with criminals who prey on banks. 95 The Terry standards defining permissible stops based on ostensible criminality from observed facts bear repeating. Before a stop may be imposed, the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure, viewed objectively, 145 must be such as would  'warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief( )' that the action taken was appropriate(.) 146 Obviously, any inference of criminality becomes weaker as, in terms of ordinary experience, the possibility of innocent explanation looms larger. And even when the circumstances call for some amount of investigation, the stop and inquiry must be 'reasonably related in scope to the justification for their initiation.'  147 That one converses with a succession of addicts does not reasonably give rise to an inference that he is engaged in narcotics traffic. 148 That one apparently of Mexican ancestry occupies an automobile near the Mexican border does not warrant an inference that he is an alien illegally in the country. 149 That one circles a residential area with an eye for the presence of policemen does not logically generate an inference that he is a would-be burglar. 150 In none of these instances did the circumstances respectively appearing justify an investigative stop. 151 I say that the mere fact that one who applies for a savings withdrawal without the necessary credentials on his person is not so singular as to imply fairly and objectively an effort to defraud the bank, or to support a detention for further inquiry in that regard. 152 96 In my view, then, appellant's Fourth Amendment right . . . to be secure in (his) person( ) . . . against unreasonable . . . seizure( ) 153 was infringed when Officer Franck escorted him back into the bank. In so concluding, and despite my difficulties with the officer's course of reasoning, I intend no impugnation of his sincerity. His testimonial performance symbolizes, for me at least, the dedicated policeman endeavoring conscientiously to do his job as best he can, but constitutionally speaking that is beside the point. If subjective good faith alone were the test, protections of the Fourth Amendment would evaporate, and the people would be 'secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects' only in the discretion of the police. 154