Court Opinion

ID: 9750457
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 14:59:26.053138+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:26:10.646616
License: Public Domain

MACK, Associate Judge,
dissenting in part:
Although the majority embellishes, with innocuous details (i.e., dimly lit street, etc.), the trial court’s finding that the police officers’ stop of appellant and his companions was permissible under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), I can accept the finding.
I most emphatically disagree, however, with the majority’s ruling that appellant *400was properly convicted of carrying a pistol without a license. Accepting as true the testimony of the government’s witness, Bolling, that appellant and the codefendant Lucas knew that Bolling was carrying a gun on his hip (disputed by appellant and Lucas), I do not think there was sufficient evidence of constructive possession to go to the jury. How can one reason that a loaded gun is “conveniently accessible” to a person charged with carrying the gun when that gun is in fact carried on another person’s hip? How can one reason that the first person has “dominion and control” over that gun either while the other person carries that gun or when the other person, during the minute of police apprehension, attempts to discard the gun? What was the proof of appellant’s involvement in the “concert of illegal activity?” Indeed what “concert of illegal activity” was there? In my view, a reasonable juror could not conclude guilt “without crossing the bounds of permissible inference and entering the forbidden territory of conjecture and speculation.” Curry v. United States, 520 A.2d 255, 266 (D.C.1987). The majority, has allowed the doctrine of constructive possession “to cast too wide a net.” Id. at 264.