Court Opinion

ID: 9701598
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 22:26:53.468417+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:02:32.329258
License: Public Domain

*1211OPINION
KELLEHER, Justice.
The opinions expressed herein are our response to the June 15, 1981 order of the United States Supreme Court1 directing this court to reconsider its holding in State v. DeMasi, R.I., 419 A.2d 285 (1980), in which a majority of this court vacated the defendants’ convictions for breaking and entering in the nighttime on the ground that the convictions resulted from the use of evidence that should have been suppressed as the fruit of an illegal detention. In its order directing reconsideration, the Supreme Court specified that our review be conducted in light of its recent ruling in United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 101 S.Ct. 690, 66 L.Ed.2d 621 (1981). Before discussing Cortez, it is proper that we give a brief resume of the pertinent evidence that caused the Supreme Court to order us to reevaluate this court’s suppression of evidence which unquestionably caused the guilty verdicts to be returned against the defendants, Ralph DeMasi and Lawrence M. Lanoue.
At approximately 4:10 a. m. on October 8, 1974, Patrolman Thomas Calabro of the Pawtucket police department was on motorized patrol in the industrial area of Paw-tucket, traveling east on Division Street. As Calabro approached the intersection of Industrial Highway and Division Street, he noticed a 1968 Mercury sedan that had been traveling south on Industrial Highway pull out in front of his car and turn left onto Division Street. As the Mercury turned, it crossed over a set of railroad tracks which were embedded in the surface of Industrial Highway. The vehicle’s rear portion was so close to the ground that a visible spray of sparks was given off as the car’s rear came in contact with the tracks’ rails. As the vehicle, occupied by three individuals, began to proceed along Division Street, Calab-ro noticed that a passenger in the vehicle’s rear seat looked back at his patrol car. The heavily laden back end of the Mercury, the spray of sparks, and the backward glance of the passenger, all joined to arouse the suspicions of Calabro, an officer who at that time had seven years’ experience on the force.
Calabro attempted to follow this vehicle as it continued down Division Street and turned onto York Avenue. He was forced to wait for a truck to proceed before he could follow. When he turned his patrol car onto York Avenue, the Mercury, he stated, “had vanished.” Calabro then took a left off York Avenue and sighted the Mercury two streets farther south, running parallel to his own position. The driver of the Mercury made a right turn, and Calabro made a right to follow it. The Mercury then turned left, Calabro turned left, and both vehicles proceeded toward Newport Avenue. The officer noted that during the course of this pursuit, the passenger in the back seat “kept looking back” at the patrol car. He testified that from his vantage point it appeared to him that the driver of the vehicle was attempting to elude him.
When Calabro had initially lost sight of the vehicle, he had radioed another police officer also patrolling in that vicinity for assistance in stopping the vehicle. Shortly after the Mercury had turned southward onto Newport Avenue, both patrol cars met up with the vehicle and turned on their flashing lights, whereupon the Mercury’s driver pulled the vehicle over and stopped. The stop occurred after the Mercury had turned left, had crossed over Newport Avenue, and had come to a halt at the intersection of Mantón Street and Courtney Avenue. Lanoue, the driver, at the officers’ request, produced what appeared to be a proper driver’s license and registration card. Seated alongside Lanoue was DeMasi. The back-seat passenger was Edward Sitko. DeMasi identified himself as “Raymond Massey” but offered no corroborating documentation. Sitko identified himself as Robert Riley as he displayed a Massachusetts driver’s license that bore that name.
At this juncture, the officers radioed police headquarters and asked the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) for a *1212check on the possibility of any outstanding warrants against “all three subjects.” It took only about five minutes to receive a response. The police officers testified that Lanoue “came back as a hit”; he was wanted by the Massachusetts State Police. In light of this information, a cruiser was dispatched to transport Lanoue to the station. One of the officers who arrived in the transport cruiser identified “Massey” as De-Masi, and DeMasi was taken into custody along with Lanoue.
When DeMasi left the vehicle to be taken into custody, Officer Calabro observed pieces of “jewelry” — unfinished metal,— gloves, and a screwdriver on the front-seat floor of the vehicle. Sitko, accompanied by the two police cruisers, drove the Mercury to the police station.
At approximately 6 a. m. the Pawtucket police learned that the Regina Manufacturing Company, a manufacturer of jewelry, had been burglarized that evening. Later, after obtaining a warrant, the police opened the Mercury’s trunk, and there, for all to see, were 500 pounds of gold and silver jewelry findings. The findings were later identified as a portion of 1,200 pounds of similar loot taken from the jewelry manufacturer.
The legal standard enunciated by the Supreme Court in Cortez, by which we must now, on reconsideration, assess the propriety of the police officers’ stop of the Mercury and defendants’ detention, requires that we make our determination in view of the “totality of the circumstances — the whole picture.” It is this whole picture that must have led the detaining officers to a “particularized and objective basis for suspecting” that the occupants of the vehicle were engaged in criminal activity. United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. at 417, 101 S.Ct. at 695, 66 L.Ed.2d at 629.
The Court described the concept of a “particularized suspicion” as comprised of two components, both of which must be satisfied for a stop to be permissible:
“First, the assessment [leading to the requisite degree of suspicion] must be based upon all the circumstances. The analysis proceeds with various objective observations, information from police reports, if such are available, and consideration of the modes or patterns of operation of certain kinds of lawbreakers. From these data, a trained officer draws inferences and makes deductions — inferences and deductions that might well elude an untrained person.
“The process does not deal with hard certainties, but with probabilities. * * * Finally, the evidence thus collected must be seen and weighed not in terms of library analysis by scholars, but as understood by those versed in the field of law enforcement.
“The second element contained in the idea that an assessment of the whole picture must yield a particularized suspicion is the concept that the process just described must raise a suspicion that the particular individual being stopped is engaged in wrongdoing.” Id. at 418, 101 S.Ct. at 695, 66 L.Ed.2d at 629.
The Court further emphasized that in reviewing the perceptions of the detaining law-enforcement officers, it is imperative to recognize that objective facts observed by such officers, although “meaningless to the untrained, can be combined with permissible deductions from such facts to form a legitimate basis for suspicion of a particular person and for action on that suspicion.” Id. at 419, 101 S.Ct. at 695, 66 L.Ed.2d at 629.
When we apply the Cortez criteria to the facts to which we have just referred, we reach the conclusion that the stop of the Mercury was based upon a reasonable suspicion that resulted from the events that occurred before Calabro’s eyes as he and the Lanoue-DeMasi-Sitko trio played an early-morning motorized game of hide-and-seek along Pawtucket’s deserted highways on October 8, 1974.
With the totality-of-circumstances concept as our guide, we note the following sequence of events: Calabro sees a heavily laden motor vehicle traveling in a highly industrial area in the early hours before *1213dawn; the night is illuminated by sparks flying from the railroad tracks as the back end of the vehicle, in Calabro’s words, “was banging the tracks”; the back-seat passenger continues to turn around periodically and keeps the cruiser under observation; and as the Mercury makes its way through Pawtucket’s highways and byways, it appears to Calabro that the trio is attempting to elude him. Calabro in his seven years of patrolling the Pawtucket highways, is at this time the type of officer whom this court in State v. Halstead, R.I., 414 A.2d 1138, 1148-49 (1980), unanimously described as capable of making a reasonable inference from observations of otherwise innocuous conduct that criminal activity is imminent or taking place. In summary, we believe, therefore, that Calabro’s decision to stop the Mercury sedan was amply justified in light of the events that continued to unfold before him from the moment he first encountered the Mercury at the railroad intersection.
Against the backdrop of the events that occurred before the Mercury sedan was stopped, it was reasonable that Officer Cal-abro’s suspicions were in no way allayed by his initial contact with Lanoue and his companions. Under the totality-of-the-circumstances test, we think it was entirely appropriate for the officer to detain the trio further for the brief time necessary to conduct an NCIC warrant cheek. Moreover, we do not consider the five-minute warrant check an unreasonable intrusion on the trio’s Fourth Amendment rights.
WEISBERGER, J., did not participate.

. See Rhode Island v. DeMasi, 452 U.S. 934, 101 S.Ct. 3072, 69 L.Ed.2d 948 (1981).