Court Opinion

ID: 9773954
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 18:05:02.33311+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:59.982730
License: Public Domain

BATTAGLIA, J., dissenting, in which HARRELL and BARBERA, JJ., join.
I respectfully dissent.
The majority erroneously holds that the police officers in the present case lacked reasonable, articulable suspicion that the occupants of the vehicle were “drug users/sellers presently involved in criminal activity” and, thus, could not detain the Petitioner, Hayward Henderson, for nine minutes1 before a K-9 unit arrived and alerted to illegal drugs in the vehicle. *151As a result, not only is evidence of drugs, a gun, and other contraband suppressed, but the Court is also telling police officers the following: when an officer performs a valid traffic stop, during which he or she arrests a passenger for a CDS-related offense, discovers a substantial amount of currency in a search of the arrestee and recognizes the driver and other passenger as having histories of CDS use and distribution, that officer must affirmatively tell the other passenger to leave the scene.2 Not saying anything for a period of nine minutes while the passenger is either in the car or by its side will, as here, result in the suppression of incriminating evidence found in the car. The absurdity of what the Court is telling law enforcement is palpable, and the majority not only fails to consider adequately all of the circumstances the police officers faced at the time of the stop but also appears to conflate the probable cause standard for arrest and the less restrictive standard of reasonable suspicion for investigating possible criminal activity.
In reversing the Court of Special Appeals and the trial court, the majority relies upon the following inferences, which were drawn in favor of Henderson, the losing party before the Circuit Court, on his motion to suppress:
(1) “From the absence of any explanation for how a person’s name gets into the ‘alert’ system, it is reasonable to infer that there are persons whose names got into that system on the basis of utterly unreliable hearsay information”;
(2) “based upon what was not testified to by the State’s witnesses, although we have no idea how Deputy Ruszala ‘knows’ Petitioner, it is reasonable to infer that Petitioner’s name did not get into the system because Deputy Ruszala was an eyewitness to Petitioner’s (1) admission that he was a drug seller, (2) conviction of a violation of the Maryland *152Controlled Dangerous Substances Act, and/or (3) sale of a controlled dangerous substance”;
(3) it was “reasonable to infer that on the evening that he stopped Petitioner’s vehicle, Deputy Ruszala had not made any observations that indicated that the occupants of that vehicle were engaging in activity consistent with the purchase or sale of controlled dangerous substances”;
(4) the State “presented no evidence whatsoever that there was anything significant about the denominations of the bills seized from Mr. Lewis’s person, or about how those bills were folded”; and
(5) “we attach a great deal of importance to the fact that no controlled dangerous substances were seized from Mr. Lewis during the search of his person that was conducted incidental to his arrest.”
Majority op. at 148-50, 5 A.3d at 1085-86. In drawing these inferences, the majority ignores our standard of review, which requires us to accept first-level factual findings unless clearly erroneous and resolve any doubts or reasonable inferences in favor of the party that prevailed at the hearing, which, in this case, was the State. See, e.g., State v. Luckett, 413 Md. 360, 375 n. 3, 993 A.2d 25, 33 n. 3 (2010); Prioleau v. State, 411 Md. 629, 638, 984 A.2d 851, 856 (2009); Jones v. State, 407 Md. 33, 45, 962 A.2d 393, 399 (2008).
Significantly, the majority also seemingly blends the probable cause standard for arrest with the reasonable, articulable suspicion standard for investigation, two standards which have long been understood as having distinct levels of suspicion that support different degrees of intrusion against persons suspected of crimes. The level of suspicion required for reasonable, articulable suspicion, the standard under which we should be viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the State, the prevailing party, is “considerably less than proof of wrongdoing by a preponderance of the evidence” and is “obviously less demanding than that for probable cause.” United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 7, 109 S.Ct. 1581, 1585, 104 L.Ed.2d 1, 10 (1989). Reasonable suspicion “can arise from information that *153is less reliable than that required to show probable cause,” Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325, 330, 110 S.Ct. 2412, 2416, 110 L.Ed.2d 301, 309 (1990), and
[t]he process does not deal with hard certainties, but with probabilities. Long before the law of probabilities was articulated as such, practical people formulated certain common sense conclusions about human behavior; jurors as factfinders are permitted to do the same—and so are law enforcement officers. 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.
United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 418, 101 S.Ct. 690, 695, 66 L.Ed.2d 621, 629 (1981), quoted in Cartnail v. State, 359 Md. 272, 288, 753 A.2d 519, 528 (2000). Reasonable suspicion is a flexible concept, which cannot be “reduced to a rigid analytical framework or a set of specific, bright-line rules.” Ferris v. State, 355 Md. 356, 385, 735 A.2d 491, 506 (1999), citing Sokolow, 490 U.S. at 7, 109 S.Ct. at 1585, 104 L.Ed.2d at 10. The majority has done just that, ignoring the province of police officers to use their knowledge and experience in making reasonable determinations of whether to investigate possible criminal activity, by forcing officers to parse through the facts and make determinations that are better suited for academics.
The majority, in isolating various facts and inferences, fails to “look at the totality of the circumstances of [this] case to see whether the detaining officer ha[d] a particularized and objective basis for suspecting legal wrongdoing” or to allow the “officers to draw on their own experience and specialized training to make inferences from and deductions about the cumulative information available to them” at the time of the investigation. United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273, 122 S.Ct. 744, 750-51, 151 L.Ed.2d 740, 749-50 (2002) (internal citations and quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added). In Arvizu, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit determined that seven of those factors relied upon by the trial court carried little or no weight in a reasonable suspicion analysis. *154Id. at 272-73, 122 S.Ct at 750, 151 L.Ed.2d at 749. The Supreme Court, in reversing, reasoned:
We think that the approach taken by the Court of Appeals here departs sharply from the teachings of these cases. The court’s evaluation and rejection of seven of the listed factors in isolation from each other does not take into account the totality of the circumstances, as our cases have understood that phrase. The court appeared to believe that each observation by [the border patrol agent] that was by itself readily susceptible to an innocent explanation was entitled to no weight. Terry, however, precludes this sort of divide-and-conquer analysis. The officer in Terry observed the petitioner and his companions repeatedly walk back and forth, look into a store window, and confer with one another. Although each of the series of acts was perhaps innocent in itself, we held that, taken together, they warranted further investigation.
Id. at 274, 122 S.Ct. at 751, 151 L.Ed.2d at 750 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted); see also Nathan v. State, 370 Md. 648, 664, 805 A.2d 1086, 1096 (2002) (noting that “courts must not view in isolation factors upon which police officers rely to create reasonable suspicion”).
Through its myopic analysis of the facts, the majority also fails to recognize one of the most obvious inferences the police officers could make during the stop in question: that Henderson, Austin, and Lewis were engaged in a common enterprise of drug activity. In Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U.S. 295, 304-05, 119 S.Ct. 1297, 1302, 143 L.Ed.2d 408, 417 (1999), the Supreme Court noted that a “car passenger ... will often be engaged in a common enterprise with the driver, and have the same interest in concealing the fruits or the evidence of their wrongdoing.” Likewise, in Maryland v. Pringle, 540 U.S. 366, 373, 124 S.Ct. 795, 801, 157 L.Ed.2d 769, 777 (2003), “it was reasonable for the officer to infer a common enterprise among the three men [in the vehicle]. The quantity of drugs and cash in the car indicated the likelihood of drug dealing, an enterprise to which a dealer would be unlikely to *155admit an innocent person with the potential to furnish evidence against him.”3
It is obvious that the circumstances of the encounter, as articulated in the trial court’s findings, create a reasonable, articulable suspicion that Henderson was involved in a common enterprise of drug activity with the two other occupants of the vehicle:
• While patrolling in the Edgewood Area of Harford County, Maryland, which is a high crime and high drug area, Deputy Ruszala of the Harford County Sheriffs Department Gang Suppression Unit engaged a car in a valid traffic stop at approximately 9:28 p.m.
• Deputy Ruszala recognized two of the car’s three occupants, including Henderson, whom he knew as a drug user and seller.
• Deputy Ruszala also recognized the driver, Austin, whom he had arrested for CDS-related charges approximately three weeks before the traffic stop at issue here.
• There was a valid, outstanding arrest warrant for the occupant of the right front passenger seat, Lewis, for failure to appear in a CDS-related case.
• A valid search incident to arrest on Lewis yielded $741 on his person.
• The traffic stop was not complete at the time of Lewis’s arrest.
In addition to the suppression court’s findings, none of which was found by the majority to be clearly erroneous, the record includes the following facts testified to by Deputy Ruszala, the arresting officer:
*156• Deputy Ruszala had personal knowledge that Henderson and Austin were known associates of each other, as Henderson was with Austin when Deputy Ruszala arrested him, three weeks before the traffic stop in question.
• Deputy Ruszala never told Henderson that he could not leave the car, and Henderson never asked to leave the car for the duration of the entire stop.
With all of this in mind, what does the majority suggest that the officers should have done with Henderson after arresting Lewis? As the trial court concluded, a reasonably prudent officer would not say to Henderson, “run along and be a good boy, you are obviously not involved in anything here,” as the majority would have that officer do.
In essence, the majority would have the officers ignore all personal knowledge they had regarding the criminal history of the vehicle’s remaining occupants and dismiss the information they received from the alert system. The majority also would have the officers disregard the $741 found on Lewis, unless they could describe the origami patterns and denominations of money preferred by drug dealers. Most of all, based on the “great deal of importance” the majority places on the lack of drugs found on Lewis, the majority would have the police officers refrain from investigating suspected drug activity, unless they had immediately found drugs, which has never been the standard to evaluate reasonable, articulable suspicion.
The police officers clearly possessed reasonable, articulable suspicion that the occupants of the vehicle were “drug users/sellers presently involved in criminal activity,” which supported their detention of Henderson until the arrival of the K-9 unit, some nine minutes after Lewis’s arrest. The judgments of the Court of Special Appeals and the Circuit Court for Harford County should be affirmed.
Judges HARRELL and BARBERA have authorized me to state that they join in this opinion.

. The majority states in its recitation of facts that ”[a]n alternate entry on the CAD report shows Lewis’s arrest as taking place at 9:43 p.m.” Maj. op. at 129, 5 A.3d at 1074. The majority later asserts, however, that, "[a]s the CAD records make clear, the K-9 unit arrived twelve minutes after Mr. Lewis was arrested.” Id. at 146-47, 5 A.3d at 1084 (emphasis added). No one has disputed that the K-9 unit arrived at 9:52 p.m., id. at 132-33, 5 A.3d at 1076 so the independent fact finding of twelve minutes by the majority is unwarranted.

. A startling proposition in this case, not only on the facts, but also because the vehicle belonged to the passenger's mother. Henderson’s abandonment of his mother’s car, even if the police officers had ordered him to leave the scene, was unlikely.

. Although the majority distinguishes Maryland v. Pringle because the facts in that case were allegedly weightier than in the present case, what really distinguishes Pringle is that the burden of proof on the State in Pringle was higher, i.e., that of probable cause. Unlike what the majority posits, the findings in this case do not need to be as persuasive as that in Pringle.