Court Opinion

ID: 9484176
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:42:57.246403+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:50:04.196729
License: Public Domain

K.K. HALL, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent because I believe that the police conduct amounted to an illegal seizure of McFarley that infected the subsequent seizure of his luggage.
Certainly the encounter in the bus station began as a consensual one. The magistrate judge found that it became non-consensual “when the defendant refused to consent to a search [of his luggage], broke off the conversation, and began walking away....” The district court placed the point of seizure further down the line, “at some point while walking up 4th St.” The majority goes even further, placing the point of seizure at 10:13 a.m., when McFar-ley was told that his bag was being detained. I think our decision in United States v. Wilson, 953 F.2d 116 (4th Cir. 1991), compels a finding that a seizure occurred well before 10:13 a.m.
The majority attempts to distinguish Wilson by pointing out that “McFarley never protested the way that Wilson did” and that McFarley’s actions were attempts at cooperation with the police. Slip op. 8. These distinctions do not mesh with the record. McFarley denied permission to search his bags, and, in doing so, he asked the police if they had a warrant. As the majority explains, “McFarley became irate and accused the officer of stopping him merely because he was a young black male who fit some type of characteristics,” and one of the officers “sought to calm McFar-ley.” Slip op. 3. This hardly bespeaks cooperation on McFarley’s part. Nonetheless, when McFarley said he was leaving and the officer said he was going to walk with him, McFarley’s response of “that’s fine” is deemed sufficient to support a finding that a reasonable person would have felt free to go and terminate the encounter. Slip op. 6. I disagree.
Officer Faulkenberry did not ask McFar-ley if he would mind if the three officers continued the questioning for awhile longer; McFarley was told that the questioning was not yet over. As we said in Wilson, “[t]he principle embodied by the phrase ‘free to leave’ means the ability to ignore the police and to walk away from them.” Id. at 122 (emphasis in original). “That’s fine," considered under all the circumstances, is a slim thread indeed on which to find that McFarley consented to being accompanied through downtown Charlotte for 20 minutes by three policemen. How a “reasonable” person would go about ending a consensual encounter is not limited to the type of behavior exhibited by the suspect in Wilson. The only logical interpretation of McFarley’s “consent” to the officer’s statement is that McFarley felt (as I believe a reasonable person would feel under similar circumstances) that he had no choice. In short, he was not free to leave, and, as a consequence, he was seized.
The majority would bring the Fourth Amendment into play at the point of the seizure of the luggage (10:13 a.m.), but holds that this seizure was supported by a reasonable, articulable suspicion of wrongdoing. I disagree. I believe not only that McFarley was seized, but, that the seizure was not based on reasonable suspicion that McFarley was engaged in criminal activity at that time.
The underpinnings for the “reasonable suspicion” finding are (1) McFarley arrived from New York, a “source city” for drugs; (2) he “appeared ‘fresh’ and well-dressed and ... was wearing a gold chain, conveying an appearance that the officers found consistent with that of drug couriers” (slip *1195op. 7); (3) he attempted to appear that he did not know Stitt; (4) he “canvassed” the bus terminal and made eye contact with Officer Faulkenberry; (5) he walked briskly from the bus while Stitt watched from behind, then joined Stitt and again looked at Faulkenberry; (6) when confronted by the policemen, he and Stitt were extremely nervous; (7) he said he had gone to New York for two days to shop for equipment for his Rung Fu studio; (8) he and Stitt provided inconsistent details about their travels; and (9) they said they were getting on a southbound bus after saying they lived in the north part of town. These factors are, as the magistrate judge noted in his report to the district court, “remarkably similar to those in Wilson.”
Factors 8 and 9 above were discovered after the point at which I would place the seizure, i.e. when McFarley began to walk away. As such, I would not consider these factors in the examination of whether there existed “reasonable suspicion” for such seizure. Taken together, the first seven factors do not rise above the level of an “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or ‘hunch’.” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 27, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 1883, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968).
Appearing fresh in the middle of the summer, after a bus trip from New York to Charlotte, strikes me as unusual, but it does not hint of criminality. Many well-dressed passengers, with and without gold chains, do not carry illegal drugs on their person. If anything, I would think that those involved in wrongdoing would attempt to blend in with the crowd. The “source city” factor stands alone and is of no probative value whatsoever. See id., at 125 (“[T]he vast number of persons coming from those source cities relegates this factor to a relatively insignificant role.”); see also United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 5, 109 S.Ct. 1581, 1584, 104 L.Ed.2d 1 (1989) (finding it probative that the defendant traveled in July from Honolulu to Miami, a source city, and returned after only 48 hours). Having gone to New York to buy martial arts equipment is similarly unremarkable and probably as believable a reason as most other passengers on the same bus could have proffered.
We are left with the actions of McFarley and Stitt after they exited the bus. Officer Faulkenberry testified that McFarley “began to stare back at him,” but again, this strikes me as an eminently reasonable response ^to Faulkenberry’s apparently quite obvious surveillance of McFarley. If a stranger stares at you, do you stare back? None of the officers were in uniform.
If McFarley was extremely nervous when he was first stopped, and the undisputed testimony is that he was, this condition was apparently short-lived. McFarley soon became irate and accusative. The entire encounter (from initial encounter through seizure of the luggage) lasted some 25 minutes. I submit that nervousness is a quite natural response to being stopped and questioned on a busy public street by three out-of-uniform policemen who have just approached from behind.
McFarley was illegally seized, and any additional grounds for suspicion of ongoing criminal activity garnered during this seizure cannot be used to justify the seizure of the luggage. I would vacate the conviction and remand with instructions to grant the motion to suppress.