Court Opinion

ID: 9736834
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 19:07:55.828276+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:23:54.701150
License: Public Domain

MONTEMURO, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent from the Majority’s conclusion that the trial court erred in denying appellants’ suppression motions, and would affirm the judgments of sentence in this case. My disagreement is based on my belief, consonant with that of Justice Papadakos’ dissent, that the Majority’s holding invalidates the drug courier profile approved by the United States Supreme Court, thus impeding drug interdiction efforts involving use of the profile by limiting its application to very specific fact patterns. Moreover, I believe this has been accomplished by dismissal of the facts as they were justifiably found by the trial court.
*514The thrust of the Majority’s holding is that the characteristics contained in the drug courier profile here were substituted by the investigating officers for personal observation of behavior which would have aroused reasonable suspicion so as to warrant a Terry stop. However, this requires dismissal of the trial court’s contrary finding, that the testimony of the investigating officer, albeit circuitous, consisted entirely of observations made by him of the appearance and conduct of the appellants on the day of their arrest. The Majority’s rejection of empirical experience as if it were mechanistic fantasy seems to me to contravene our scope of review, and to impugn the integrity of the trial court, who emphatically determined the facts to be otherwise than the Majority has done. In concluding as it does, the Majority has ignored the admonition of our Supreme Court in United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 109 S.Ct. 1581, 104 L.Ed.2d 1 (1989), that “[a] court sitting to determine the existence of reasonable suspicion must require the agent to articulate the factors leading to that conclusion, but the fact that these factors may be set forth in a ‘profile’ does not somehow detract from their evidentiary significance as seen by a trained agent.” Id. at 10, 109 S.Ct. at 1587.
The reversal of the trial court’s finding here, however, is merely a necessary precondition for the larger conclusion that while the drug courier profile is “not per se unreasonable” (Majority Opinion at 625), it is nevertheless constitutionally unacceptable because it is used independently of personal observation, the instant case bearing witness to its unacceptability. Thus, the objection is used to prove itself.
I disagree with the Majority’s conclusions, both because I believe the profiles to be useful tools in the interdiction process when not, as here, limited to replication of the facts in Sokolow, and because I believe there is no conflict between the profile and personal observation.
Accordingly, I would affirm the judgments of sentence.
PAPADAKOS, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.