Court Opinion

ID: 9715253
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 05:58:45.635405+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:32.982422
License: Public Domain

Mr. JUSTICE BARRY, specially concurring: Although there was no description of the defendant, in accord with Justice Stengel I believe the stop here was not an arrest, but rather was a reasonable limited intrusion upon the defendant’s liberty, considering that a crime had been committed nearby minutes before. There were, in my opinion, sufficient articulable objective facts necessary to justify a proper investigatory Terry stop, a stop authorized for the protection of the officers and others. Further, I find no evidence of coercion to have caused the defendant to accompany the officers to the 7-11 Store. It is uncontroverted that the defendant indicated that he saw someone running from the direction of the scene, that he was then requested by the officers to go to the scene to assist in the investigation, and that he then consented to join the officers voluntarily. However, although for these reasons I concur with the result reached by Justice Stengel, I cannot, and do not, subscribe to all of the reasoning used by Justice Stengel in affirming the trial court. I believe that Mendenhall and McGowan, while standing as authority for Justice Stengel’s position, represent dangerous precedents which must be applied cautiously and with restraint to cases such as this. I consider them to be “dangerous” in the sense that repeated reliance upon them may result in an unwarranted expansion of their holdings and a concomitant continual erosion of the right of every citizen to be free from unjustified governmental intrusion. I believe that Mendenhall and McGowan represent the extreme with regard to the minimum facts necessary to justify an investigatory Terry type stop. The giving of a judicial imprimatur to every investigatory stop through a reliance on these cases will transform the objective articulable facts now required by police officers under Terry to a mere bare subjective suspicion. As I have stated, I believe sufficient objective facts are present in this case to justify the police conduct, and therefore I concur. However, because of my misgivings about the reliance upon Mendenhall and McGowan by Justice Stengel under the facts of this case, this concurrence is qualified.