Court Opinion

ID: 9641083
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:22:40.9794+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:34.877492
License: Public Domain

FARRELL, Associate Judge,
concurring in the result:
The trial judge made what amounts to a finding that before Officer Barnes saw the butt of the handgun in appellant’s pocket, Officer Reynolds had asked appellant three times whether he was carrying (“packing”) a gun. In denying appellant’s motion to suppress, the judge “reject[ed] the proposition that [the officer’s conduct in] having asked Mr. Hawkins three times under the circumstances whether he was packing a gun was anything other than reasonable under the circumstances and [the judge concluded] certainly did not constitute any type of stop” (emphasis added). The government’s recitation of the facts in its brief likewise accepts the evidence as showing that before Officer Barnes saw the gun, she “heard Reynolds ask appellant at least three times if he was armed.”1 On this factual basis, therefore, we must decide the legal issue of whether appellant was “seized” within the Fourth Amendment before Barnes saw the gun, in circumstances where the officers concededly had no articulable suspicion justifying a seizure before that sighting.
In my judgment, once Reynolds had asked appellant a third time whether he was packing a gun, a reasonable person in appellant’s *1229shoes2 no longer would have believed himself free to ignore the question and end the encounter with the officer. I need not decide whether the question, if asked once or even twice, would have induced the same reasonable belief. I also do not share the view of our colleague Judge Mack that appellant was seized before Reynolds even broached the question of whether appellant was carrying a gun. Before that event, the evidence showed only that the officers had approached appellant’s stationary vehicle with guns undrawn, asked to talk to him about his role as victim in a recent serious assault (eliciting his ready consent), asked him also to move his ear from the middle of the street to the curb and to turn off the engine while they talked,3 and positioned themselves each on one side of the car.4 Reynolds displayed his badge for the unexceptionable purpose of identification, since the officers were in civilian dress and their vehicle unmarked. As the trial judge found, the manner by which Reynolds initially asked respondent if he could question him about the identity of his assailants was not threatening or intimidating. In short, Judge King and I are in agreement that these facts alone do not add up to a seizure.
Nor, I will assume, did the calculus change when Reynolds first asked appellant whether he was “packing anything.” Asked why he had put that question, Reynolds testified that he had done so “basically instinctively] from the past ... £j]ust from past dealings with the situation with Mr. Hawkins.” These “past dealings” were not explained, and the government does not argue that in themselves, or together with anything else that transpired before the gun was sighted, they furnished articulable suspicion to justify a seizure. But, given Reynolds’ knowledge that appellant had been the victim of a previous shooting and, indeed, that someone had reportedly visited him at the hospital “to try to finish the job with [an] ice pick of some sort,” I think the officer reasonably could have sought assurances that appellant had not armed himself with retaliation in mind, and that appellant reasonably would have discerned this (or a similar) non-accusatory purpose for the question, ie., one consistent with his freedom to terminate the encounter.
Appellant denied he was packing a gun, whereupon Reynolds asked him the question a second time in evident mistrust of his answer.5 On the facts presented, I also need not decide whether this repetition of the question by an officer who so far apparently had not gotten the cooperation he desired (appellant had told him he didn’t know “the guys who came in there to try and finish the job”), and was skeptical of appellant’s first denial that he was “packing,” would have induced appellant reasonably to believe his interaction with the police was no longer voluntary. For Reynolds pressed appellant *1230about Ms possession of a gun a tMrd time. At this point, I cannot conceive that a reasonable person would not have understood the question as accusatory and that Ms freedom to “ ‘go about Ms business,’” Bostick, supra note 2, 501 U.S. at 437, 111 S.Ct. at 2387 (quoting Michigan v. Chesternut, 486 U.S. 567, 569, 108 S.Ct. 1975, 1977, 100 L.Ed.2d 565 (1988)), depended on giving satisfactory assurance to the officers that he was not carrying a gun. I attach no importance to the fact that appellant immediately simulated such assurance by displaying Ms money as “all he had” on his person; the point, rather, is that a reasonable (innocent) person in the circumstances would have felt constrained to offer similar proof as the price of being allowed to go Ms way. In short, he would have been seized for the time necessary to give that assurance. See Oliver v. United States, 618 A.2d 705 (D.C.1993).
Because the government’s sole tendered (and sole legitimate) theory for recovery of the gun is its plain view discovery during a consensual encounter, I agree that the gun must be suppressed: the circumstances crossed the critical line between consent and coercion when Reynolds pressed appellant a third time about Ms possession of a gun. The drugs must also be suppressed as a fruit of the ensuing search incident to arrest.

. In her testimony, Barnes answered affirmatively both to whether Reynolds had asked the question "at least three times" and to whether he had asked it “approximately three times” before Barnes began watching appellant's movements and saw the gun. A moment earlier she had said Reynolds asked it “twice or three times."

. That reasonable person, of course, postulates a reasonable innocent person. Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429, 438, 111 S.Ct. 2382, 2388, 115 L.Ed.2d 389 (1991).

. Although not decisive to my analysis in any event, I note that the police did not "direct” appellant to park his car and turn off the car's engine, as Judge Mack states, ante at 1226. Reynolds testified that he “asked" appellant to pull over, or "asked could he [appellant] please” pull over and park. Barnes stated that she did not recall Reynolds ordering or directing appellant to move the car. The judge credited the officers' testimony.

. That this was the manner of approaching a car the team was trained to use in the normal “traffic stop” situation may well bear on whether a reasonable person approached would regard it as a show of force indicating he was not free to go about his business. That factor alone, however, cannot decide this case, given the Supreme Court's treatment of police positioning in Bostick. See 501 U.S. at 435, 437, 111 S.Ct. at 2386, 2387 (fact that encounter takes place in bus, with “police tower[ing] over a seated passenger ... [who has] little room to move around” is "one factor” in whether there has been a seizure, “but it is not the only one”).

.In contrast to Barnes’ testimony, Reynolds testified that he "believed” Barnes had signalled to him her sighting of the gun in appellant's pocket after Reynolds had asked appellant the first time whether he was carrying a gun. But the trial judge apparently rejected this version of the events, and the government does not rely on it, perhaps because of Reynolds’ further testimony about the events. That is, he explained that appellant reached into his pocket and pulled out money, explaining to Barnes that that was all he was carrying. But Barnes testified that appellant had made these movements, in the process exposing the gun, only after Reynolds had asked appellant "at least" or "approximately” three times if he was carrying a gun.