Court Opinion

ID: 9764936
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 03:44:46.58829+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:52:14.788396
License: Public Domain

REILLY, Associate Judge
(dissenting):
While the question is a close one, I do not share the view that defendant’s constitutional rights were violated by the police. The transcript shows that neither the defendant nor Cooper, the supposed confederate arrested with him, took the stand. Hence the testimony given at the trial by one of the investigating officers being wholly uncontradicted, must be taken as true.
According to this official witness, he and another plainclothesman in driving west in the 800 block of E Street, Southeast, observed the two men walking — apparently in the opposite direction, one carrying a bulky television set and the other holding a screwdriver in his hand. At the time the pair caught their attention, they were only two or three doors away from a townhouse apartment at 817 E Street,1 which had just been broken into, although the officers were not aware of that fact until sometime later. Judicial notice may be taken of the fact, however, that in a city where numerous burglaries and housebreaking cases are reported daily, television sets are among the most popular objects of pilferage. Clemm v. United States, D.C.App., 260 A.2d 687, 688 (1970). Hence alert police officers can scarcely be faulted for becoming curious when they saw such an uncartoned, unwieldy item being carried by hand.
Plainly it could not have come from a dealer’s shop. If sold at second hand by a private individual, it was odd for the purchaser to carry it through the streets himself rather than borrowing a car from a friend, if he or his family did not own one.
In this instance, the officers reversed the direction of their car immediately, got out, and approached the two men at the other end of the block. Whether the two became wary because of what must have been an abrupt U-turn and suspected that the occupants of the car were policemen, the record does not show. The appellant, however as they approached, did heighten police suspicion by dropping the screwdriver and then denying it was his. If appellant had this tool with him for ordinary carpentry purposes, he would scarcely have disclaimed its possession.
It seems to me that the officers’ reasons for suspicion at this point were more than confirmed prior to arrest by the implausible account appellant and his friend then gave of how the television set happened to be in their possession, vis., that a cousin of Cooper had sold the set to appellant and had dropped him and Cooper in the 900 block of G Street, Southeast, whence they walked north to Pennsylvania Avenue and Ninth Street. If this were true, they would have been proceeding westerly, not *256easterly, on E Street when first seen by the witness. Moreover, if the seller had the set in his automobile at the time he sold it, his failure to deliver it to the place where the purchaser lived was strange.
Under all the circumstances, it would appear that the police had not only good reason to be suspicious but had probable cause to believe the set had been stolen. See Bell v. United States, 102 U.S.App.D.C. 383, 254 F.2d 82, cert. denied, 358 U.S. 885, 79 S.Ct. 126, 3 L.Ed.2d 113 (1958); Allen v. United States, 129 U.S.App.D.C. 61, 390 F.2d 476 (1968), motion to modify opinion denied, 131 U.S.App.D.C. 358, 404 F.2d 1335 (1968).

. When accosted a minute or two later by the officers, they were approaching the intersection of 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue, Southeast.