Court Opinion

ID: 9758982
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:58:47.699324+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:57.765336
License: Public Domain

ZAPPALA, Justice,
dissenting.
Again I must dissent from the majority’s result-oriented approach to the interpretation of a very important statute of this Commonwealth, namely, the Intra-State Hot Pursuit Act, 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 8901 (repealed August 15, 1982). In effect, what the majority attempts to do, as Mr. Justice McDermott more candidly sets forth in his Concurring Opinion, is to broaden this statute to allow for an extra-territorial Terry stop, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). This is neither contemplated by the statute nor logical.
The purpose of a Terry stop is to detain a person on less than probable cause where the officer has some specific, articulable reason to suspect that criminal activity is afoot, and frisk him if similarly identifiable reasons give rise to a suspicion of danger to himself. It is the danger to the officer combined with the possibility of criminal activity which allow the probable cause standard to be relaxed. In the instant case there was no danger to the police officers who were following the automobile, since the occupants were merely seen for a second time in an area where previous burglaries had been committed. No evidence of present crime had been obtained. The police were acting solely in an investigatory capacity in an attempt to solve prior crimes. Investigation, in and of itself, contemplates slow, methodical actions over time and not the immediacy and freshness underlying the purpose of the Act. It is therefore clear to me that the Act was not intended to empower a police officer to act outside his jurisdiction on less than probable cause.
*148As the majority points out, the statute requires that (1) an offense has been committed within the officer’s political subdivision; and (2) pursuit continues following commission of the offense, (At 144). The operative word here is continues. Where, as here, police officers are merely investigating a series of crimes and conducting a stakeout of the general area, looking for suspicious activity but not possessing any specific description of a suspect person or vehicle, it cannot be said that those officers are pursuing or continuing to pursue the perpetrator of even these prior crimes, since they have no indication of who those perpetrators are.
The fact that the Appellees here were stopped only two tenths of a mile outside the arresting officers’ jurisdiction makes the proper application of the Act appear to work an unfairness on the police. Regrettably, however, the legislature either overlooked or did not deem it appropriate to extend the extra-territorial authority of the Act to police officers merely investigating the commission of a crime.
Indeed, to find support for the legislature’s intention to apply no less than a probable cause standard to extra-territorial police jurisdiction, one need only look to the replacement for § 8901, 42 Pa.C.S. § 8953 which provides in relevant part:
Section 8953. Statewide municipal police jurisdiction, (a) General rule. — Any duly employed municipal police officer who is within this Commonwealth, but beyond the territorial limits of his primary jurisdiction, shall have the power and authority to enforce the laws of this Commonwealth or otherwise perform the functions of that office as if enforcing those laws or performing those functions within the territorial limits of his primary jurisdiction in the following cases:
(2) Where the officer is in hot pursuit of any person for any offense which was committed, or which he has probable cause to believe was committed, within his primary jurisdiction and for which offense the officer continues *149in fresh pursuit of that person after the commission of the offense. (Emphasis added).
It is clear from the facts of the instant case that the police officers did not possess the probable cause necessary to effectuate an arrest of the Appellees and the Superior Court so held. It is not for this Court to judicially graft that power onto the statute in order to ratify the actions of the police in what otherwise appears to be a valid conviction.
At best, under the instant facts, the officers possessed only an articulable suspicion which might justify a Terry stop. For the reasons I stated in my dissent in Commonwealth v. Cortez, 507 Pa. 529, 491 A.2d 111 (1985) (Zappala, J. dissenting), however, I question whether the police even had that justification since the record is devoid of any evidence that the police knew that “specific conduct of the seized person, observed by them, justified and made reasonable their belief that criminal activity was afoot and that the seized person was armed and dangerous.” Cortez, 507 Pa. at 540, 491 A.2d at 116, citing Commonwealth v. Hicks, 434 Pa. 153, 160, 253 A.2d 276, 280 (1969). I therefore dissent and would affirm the order of the Superior Court.