Opinion ID: 352420
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Officer's Observations

Text: 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.