Court Opinion

ID: 9755908
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 20:59:25.394233+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:12.900792
License: Public Domain

WILNER, Judge.
The State of Maryland contends that it is permissible for a police officer who observes a man doing nothing more than standing on a sidewalk on a summer night talking with a friend, to stop and frisk that person because (1) they were in a high-crime area, (2) the man had a bulge in his front pants pocket, (3) the man gazed at the unmarked police car containing three plain-clothed officers as it drove by and slowed to a stop, and (4) when the three officers got out of the car, approached the man, identified themselves as police officers, and one began to ask him questions, the man appeared nervous and avoided eye contact with the officer. The State is wrong. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968) does not go quite that far.

BACKGROUND

The relevant facts, taken from testimony presented at a suppression hearing, are essentially undisputed. At around 11:20 p.m. on July 28, 2000, Officer Javier Moro and two other officers were cruising in an unmarked police car along the 100 block of North Decker Street in Baltimore City — an area that *101had produced numerous complaints of narcotics activity, discharging of weapons, and loitering. They were looking for “loitering activity, congregation on vacant steps, [and] loud groups of people hanging around the corners.” As they proceeded down the street, Moro noticed petitioner, Deshawn Ransome, with another man, either standing or walking on the sidewalk. Moro did not know petitioner or the other man and did not see them do anything unusual — petitioner did not reach into his pocket or exchange anything with the other man. They were not loitering or congregating on steps, and there is no evidence that they were loud or boisterous or hanging around a corner. They were simply there.
As the car approached the pair, it slowed to a stop and petitioner turned to look at the car. Officer Moro, for some reason, regarded that as suspicious. He also noted that petitioner had a large bulge in his left front pants pocket, which Moro took as an indication that petitioner might have a gun. The three officers promptly exited the car, and Moro approached petitioner. A second officer engaged the other man while the third remained close by observing both encounters. Moro said that “based upon the bulge, I was going to conduct a stop and frisk,” but he decided to ask petitioner some questions first, “to buy me time to feel him out.” (Emphasis added). He asked petitioner first whether Moro could talk to him, to which petitioner gave no response. He then asked petitioner’s name and address, which petitioner gave. The address was about six or seven blocks away. Both answers were truthful.
At that point, pursuant to his admitted intention, Moro directed petitioner to place his hands on top of his head and proceeded to pat down his waist area — not the pocket area where he had noticed the bulge. That was the moment, according to Officer Moro, that petitioner was no longer free to leave. Moro detected a small bulge, which he suspected was a controlled dangerous substance, and that led him to search further. When he discovered a bag of marijuana in the waist area, he placed petitioner under formal arrest and continued his search incident to that arrest. The extended *102search revealed that the bulge in petitioner’s pants pocket consisted of a roll of money — $946. In other parts of his clothing, Moro found 72 ziplock bags and some cocaine.
Petitioner was charged with simple possession and possession with intent to distribute marijuana and cocaine. Upon the denial of his motion to suppress the evidence taken from him, petitioner proceeded to trial on an agreed statement of facts, was convicted, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Court of Special Appeals affirmed that judgment, and we granted certiorari to consider whether Officer Moro had reasonable suspicion to conduct the stop and frisk that led to the discovery of the challenged evidence. Believing that he did not, we shall hold that the evidence was inadmissible and shall therefore reverse the judgment of the intermediate appellate court.

DISCUSSION

The State does not even suggest, much less argue, that Officer Moro had probable cause to seize and search petitioner. The issue is whether, under the rules of engagement announced in Terry v. Ohio, supra, he had reasonable suspicion to frisk petitioner for possible weapons.
Although hundreds — perhaps thousands — of stop and frisk cases have been decided since Terry was filed in 1968, the pronouncements in that case still provide both the Constitutional rationale and the basic Constitutional boundaries of the street-encounter stop and frisk, and it is therefore helpful to start by looking at what the Court said there. The stop and frisk in Terry took place after a seasoned police officer had observed two men, occasionally joined by a third, pacing back and forth along a short stretch of the street, pausing each time to look into a particular store window. This occurred about a dozen times over a twelve minute period. Suspicious that the men were “casing” the store in preparation for a robbery and concerned that they may therefore be armed, the officer confronted them and patted down their outer clothing, finding *103that each was in fact armed. The issue, as here, was the admissibility of the fruits of the pat-down search.
The Court began its analysis by confirming that, although a mere accosting and engagement of a person in conversation may not invoke Fourth Amendment protections, a stop and frisk does — that when the officer grabbed Mr. Terry, there was a Fourth Amendment “seizure,” and that when he conducted his pat-down frisk, there was a search. Terry, supra,, 392 U.S. at 19, 88 S.Ct. at 1879, 20 L.Ed.2d at 904-05. Noting that the Fourth Amendment proscribes “unreasonable” searches and seizures, the Court viewed the question as whether those actions, judged against an objective standard, were reasonable: “would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search ‘warrant a [person] of reasonable caution in the belief that the action taken was appropriate?” Id. at 21-22, 88 S.Ct. at 1880, 20 L.Ed.2d at 906 (quoting, in part, Carroll, v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 162, 45 S.Ct. 280, 288, 69 L.Ed. 543, 555 (1925)). In that regard, the Court concluded that:
“When an officer is justified in believing that the individual whose suspicious behavior he is investigating at close range is armed and presently dangerous to the officer or to others, it would appear to be clearly unreasonable to deny the officer the power to take necessary measures to determine whether the person is in fact carrying a weapon and to neutralize the threat of physical harm.”
Id. at 24, 88 S.Ct. at 1881, 20 L.Ed.2d at 908. It iterated that point and restated its conclusion thusly:
“[T]here must be a narrowly drawn authority to permit a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer, where he has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual, regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest the individual for a crime. The officer need not be absolutely certain that the individual is armed; the issue is whether a reasonably prudent [person] in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his [or her] safety or that of others was in *104danger [citations omitted]. And in determining whether the officer acted reasonably in such circumstances, due weight must be given, not to his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or ‘hunch,’ but to the specific reasonable inferences which [the officer] is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his experience.”
Id. at 27, 88 S.Ct. at 1883, 20 L.Ed.2d at 909. Earlier in the opinion, the Court made clear that, “in justifying the particular intrusion the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion,” noting in a footnote that “[t]his demand for specificity in the information upon which police action is predicated is the central teaching of this Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.” Id. at 21, 88 S.Ct. at 1880, 20 L.Ed.2d at 906.
The case law since Terry has refined, in a myriad of contexts, the circumstances under which a seizure actually occurs, when a search exceeds the proper bounds of a Terry frisk, and how the factual circumstances known to and articulated by the officer are to be viewed in determining whether they suffice to engender a reasonable suspicion, but the fundamental contours of Terry remain in place. See United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273-74, 122 S.Ct. 744, 750-51, 151 L.Ed.2d 740, 749-50 (2002); Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 123-24, 120 S.Ct. 673, 675-76, 145 L.Ed.2d 570, 575-76 (2000); Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 695-96, 116 S.Ct. 1657, 1661, 134 L.Ed.2d 911, 918-19 (1996); Nathan v. State, 370 Md. 648, 659-60, 805 A.2d 1086, 1093 (2002); Cartnail v. State, 359 Md. 272, 285-86, 753 A.2d 519, 526-27 (2000).
One of the clarifications made by the Supreme Court is that, in determining whether an officer possessed a reasonable suspicion sufficient to justify a stop and frisk, the court must look at the “totality of the circumstances” and not parse out each individual circumstance for separate consideration, Arvizu, supra, 534 U.S. at 274, 122 S.Ct. at 751, 151 L.Ed.2d at 750; United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 8, 109 S.Ct. 1581,1585, 104 L.Ed.2d 1, 10 (1989), and that it must allow the police officers “to draw on their own experience and special*105ized training to make inferences from and deductions about the cumulative information available to them that ‘might well elude an untrained person.’ ” Arvizu, supra, 534 U.S. at 273, 122 S.Ct. at 750-51, 151 L.Ed.2d at 750-51 (quoting, in part, United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 418, 101 S.Ct. 690, 695, 66 L.Ed.2d 621, 629 (1981)). A factor that, by itself, may be entirely neutral and innocent, can, when viewed in combination with other circumstances, raise a legitimate suspicion in the mind of an experienced officer.
Seizing upon that, the State urges that we take into account not only Officer Moro’s observation and concern about the bulge in petitioner’s left front pocket, but also the fact that this was a high-crime area from which complaints about drug activity, loitering, and shootings had come, that it was late at night and the lighting was poor, that petitioner gazed upon the police car as it approached the pair but then declined to keep eye contact when confronted by Officer Moro, and that petitioner appeared nervous when the officer briefly questioned him. Viewing all of those circumstances together, it argues that Officer Moro had reasonable suspicion to believe that petitioner was armed and dangerous and that the pat-down for weapons was therefore justified.
It is true that, in his testimony at the suppression hearing, Officer Moro noted that the area was a high-crime one, which is why he and his fellow officers were assigned to patrol it. He also recounted that petitioner stopped and looked at the car as it approached, and that, as Moro questioned petitioner, he ceased making eye contact and “his voice was getting real nervous.” At one point, he stated that his decision to conduct the frisk was “based upon what I’m seeing with the bulge in his pocket and the way the defendant’s mannerism, the way he’s talking to me.” Although, for purposes of this appeal, we shall assume that all of those circumstances went into the mix, we do pause to note that the extent to which they, or indeed any of them, were truly a factor in the decision to stop and frisk petitioner is not at all clear. In response to questions from the court, Officer Moro stated that his decision to stop *106and frisk petitioner was based solely on his observation of the bulge in petitioner’s pocket and his immediate conclusion from that bulge that petitioner may be armed. He said first that “based upon just observing the bulge alone of being possibly a hard object or weapon that that would give me enough reasonable suspicion as well as becoming [fearful] of my safety and my other officers, that I had enough to go do a stop and frisk on this gentleman.” A moment later, he confirmed that “[b]ased upon the bulge, I was going to conduct a stop and frisk. The reason I asked these questions was just to buy me time to feel him out, but I was — at that point, I was going to do a stop and frisk.”1
Perhaps in recognition of the central role that the pocket bulge played in Officer Moro’s decision to conduct the stop and frisk, the State asks us to look at “the plethora of cases” in which courts have sustained such conduct “in factually similar circumstances.” It turns our attention first to Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106, 98 S.Ct. 330, 54 L.Ed.2d 331 (1977), which, in its view, stands for the proposition that “a bulge alone may justify a frisk.” We think that the State gives Mimms too expansive a reading.
In Mimms, the police observed the defendant driving on an expired tag. They pulled him over and ordered him out of the *107car. As he alighted, they noticed a large bulge under his sport coat, apparently in his waist area, and, fearful that the bulge might be a weapon, patted down that area and discovered a loaded revolver. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed Mimms’s conviction for carrying a concealed weapon on the ground that the police had no authority to order Mimms out of the car and that their doing so constituted an impermissible seizure. In a per curiam opinion, the Supreme Court reversed that decision, holding that the hazards facing officers when engaged in traffic stops justified the minor intrusion of removing the driver from the car. The Court further concluded that the bulge in the waist area of the jacket permitted the officer to conclude that Mimms was armed and dangerous and that it was therefore reasonable for the officer, in that circumstance, to conduct the pat-down. It is that part of Mimms upon which the State relies.
The Court recognized in Terry that encounters between the police and citizens “are incredibly rich in diversity,” that “[n]o judicial opinion can comprehend the protean variety of the street encounter,” and that “we can only judge the facts of the case before us.” Terry, supra, 392 U.S. at 13, 15, 88 S.Ct. at 1875, 1876, 20 L.Ed.2d at 901, 902; see also Ornelas, supra, 517 U.S. at 696, 116 S.Ct. at 1661-62, 134 L.Ed.2d at 919; Cortez, supra, 449 U.S. at 417, 101 S.Ct. at 695, 66 L.Ed.2d at 628-29. Gertrude Stein’s characterization of the rose does not fit: when judging the facts under the Fourth Amendment Terry rubric, we reject the notion that a bulge is a bulge is a bulge is a bulge, no matter where it is, what it looks like, or the circumstances surrounding its observation. We accept, as Mimms and our own knowledge of what occurs with alarming frequency on our streets require us to do, that a noticeable bulge in a man’s waist area may well reasonably indicate that the man is armed. Ordinarily, men do not stuff bulky objects into the waist areas of their trousers and then walk, stand, or drive around in that condition; regrettably, the cases that we see tell us that those who go aimed do often carry handguns in that fashion. We can take judicial notice of the fact, however, that, as most men do not carry purses, they, of *108necessity, carry innocent personal objects in their pants pockets — wallets, money clips, keys, change, credit cards, cell phones, cigarettes, and the like — objects that, given the immutable law of physics that matter occupies space, will create some sort of bulge. To apply Mimms, which involved a large bulge in the waist area observed upon the stop of a man who had been driving on an expired tag, uncritically to any large bulge in any man’s pocket, would allow the police to stop and frisk virtually every man they encounter. We do not believe that Mimms, or any other Supreme Court decision, was intended to authorize that kind of intrusion.
There have been, to be sure, many cases in which a bulge in a man’s clothing, along with other circumstances, has justified a frisk, and those cases are entirely consistent with Terry. See, for example, United States v. Hassan El, 5 F.3d 726 (4th Cir.1993) (after traffic stop in high-crime area, police observed defendant, a passenger in the car, moving his hands toward a bulge in the center of his waistband); United States v. Baker, 78 F.3d 135 (4th Cir.1996) (police stopped car after it ran red light and, together with other cars apparently driving in tandem, took evasive action, observed triangular shaped bulge under front of driver’s shirt near waistband of pants, ordered driver to raise shirt and saw gun when he did so); United States v. $84,000 U.S. Currency, 717 F.2d 1090 (7th Cir.1983) (defendant, meeting drug courier profile, questioned at airport and admitted his luggage contained some marijuana and cocaine; officer noticed bulge in pants legs near top of boots; patted down for safety); People v. DeBour, 40 N.Y.2d 210, 386 N.Y.S.2d 375, 352 N.E.2d 562 (1976) (defendant encountered on deserted street after midnight in mid-October; said he had no identification; police noted waist-high bulge in defendant’s jacket; when, at officer’s request, defendant unzippered jacket, police saw handgun); State v. Sleep, 590 N.W.2d 235 (S.D.1999) (defendant stopped for erratic driving; while he accompanied officer to patrol car, officer noticed bulge in right front pocket and asked if he had a weapon; defendant admitted having a knife and gave it to officer; officer then noticed two bulges in left pocket and when defendant refused to say *109what they were, officer patted the area); Woody v. State, 765 A.2d 1257 (Del.2001) (defendant spotted with two other men behind residence in high-crime area at 9:30 on January night, ran away when he noticed uniformed officers and was seen clutching bulge in left front coat pocket; when apprehended, police patted area); State v. Schneider, 389 N.W.2d 604 (N.D. 1986) (as defendant sat in patrol car awaiting issuance of traffic ticket, officer noticed bulge under defendant’s coat that appeared to be a revolver in a shoulder holster and patted the area); Commonwealth v. Graham, 554 Pa. 472, 721 A.2d 1075 (1998) (at 1:45 a.m., officer noticed three men on porch of day care center, recognized the men and knew that warrant was outstanding for one of them; as men walked away, officer stopped them, noticed bulge in left front pocket of second man and conducted pat-down); United States v. Trullo, 809 F.2d 108, 113-14 (1st Cir.1987) (after observing appellant engage in what officer believed was drug transaction in high-crime area, officer stopped defendant’s car and had him get out, in the process noticed bulge in his right front pocket and patted it; court stressed that generalized suspicions about those engaged in drug trade being armed became particularized upon observation of bulge); United States v. Roggeman, 279 F.3d 573 (8th Cir.2002) (as defendant was alighting from truck following traffic stop, officer noticed bulge in right fi-ont pocket of a size consistent with small caliber handgun).
Each of those cases presents a combination of circumstances justifying a reasonable belief that the bulge noticed by the officer may be a weapon or that criminal activity may be afoot, a combination lacking here. Officer Moro never explained why he thought that petitioner’s stopping to look at his unmarked car as it slowed down was suspicious or why petitioner’s later nervousness or loss of eye . contact, as two police officers accosted him on the street, was suspicious. As noted, Terry requires the officer to point to “specific and articulable facts” justifying his conduct. Unlike the defendants in the cited cases, or indeed in Terry, petitioner had done nothing to attract police attention other than being on the street with a bulge in his pocket at the same time Officer *110Moro drove by. He had not committed any obvious offense, he was not lurking behind a residence or found on a day care center porch late at night, was not without identification, was not a known criminal or in company with one, was not reaching for the bulge in his pocket or engaging in any other threatening conduct, did not take evasive action or attempt to flee, and the officer was not alone to face him.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals made the point quite well in United States v. Wilson, 953 F.2d 116 (4th Cir.1991). There, the district court found that an officer had reasonable suspicion to conduct a stop and frisk, based .in part upon the observation of a bulge in the defendant’s coat pocket. Id. at 120. In reversing the district court’s refusal to suppress evidence obtained from the frisk, the Court of Appeals stated:
“The bulge is not the sort of observation that has any significance. A coat pocket is a quite usual location for a bulky object, and there is no indication that Wilson attempted to obscure the agents’ view of the bulge. See United States v. Millan, 912 F.2d 1014, 1017 (8th Cir.1990) (observation of two bulges in suspect’s inner coat pockets not of a suspicious nature). Our decisions that mention bulges as a factor in the reasonable suspicion analysis all involve attempts by a suspect to hide the bulge and/or the observation of a bulge in an unusual location.”
Id. at 125; see also United States v. Cooper, 43 F.3d 140 (5th Cir.1995) (“[w]hile the district court rejected the position that the ‘suspicious bulge’ was an articulable fact contributing to the officer’s reasonable suspicion that criminal activity was afoot, we disagree. A large bulge located in such an unusual place on a suspect may be a factor warranting reasonable suspicion.”); United States v. Powell, 886 F.2d 81 (4th Cir. 1989); United States v. Aguiar, 825 F.2d 39 (4th Cir.1987); United States v. Lehmann, 798 F.2d 692 (4th Cir.1986); United States v. Harrison, 667 F.2d 1158 (4th Cir.1982).
The command that we generally respect the inferences and conclusions drawn by experienced police officers does not require that we abandon our responsibility to make the ulti*111mate determination of whether the police have acted in a lawful manner or that we “rubber stamp” conduct simply because the officer believed he had a right to engage in it. We understand that conduct that would seem innocent to an average layperson may properly be regarded as suspicious by a trained or experienced officer, but if the officer seeks to justify a Fourth Amendment intrusion based on that conduct, the officer ordinarily must offer some explanation of why he or she regarded the conduct as suspicious; otherwise, there is no ability to review the officer’s action. See United States v. Gooding, 695 F.2d 78, 82 (4th Cir.1982) (although the court should consider the officer’s subjective perceptions that may escape an untrained observer, “any such special meaning must be articulated to the courts and its reasonableness as a basis for seizure assessed independently of the police officers’ subjective assertions, if the courts rather than the police are to be the ultimate enforcers of the principle.”) (citing Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47, 52, 99 S.Ct. 2637, 2641, 61 L.Ed.2d 357, 362 (1979)).
We are fully cognizant of dangers constantly lurking on our streets and of the plight of conscientious police officers who have to make split-second decisions in balancing their duties, on the one hand, to detect and prevent crime and assure their own safety while, on the other, respecting the dignity and Constitutional rights of persons they confront. The conduct here, on the record before us, crossed the line. If the police can stop and frisk any man found on the street at night in a high-crime area merely because he has a bulge in his pocket, stops to look at an unmarked car containing three un-uniformed men, and then, when those men alight suddenly from the car and approach the citizen, acts nervously, there would, indeed, be little Fourth Amendment protection left for those men who live in or have occasion to visit high-crime areas. We hold that Officer Moro did not have a reasonable basis for frisking petitioner and that the evidence recovered by him as a result of the frisk and subsequent extended search was inadmissible.
*112JUDGMENT OF COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS REVERSED; CASE REMANDED TO THAT COURT WITH INSTRUCTIONS TO .REVERSE JUDGMENT OF CIRCUIT COURT FOR BALTIMORE CITY AND REMAND THE CASE TO THAT COURT FOR NEW TRIAL; COSTS IN THIS COURT AND IN COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS TO BE PAID BY MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL OF BALTIMORE.

. These questions were prompted by Moros admission that, in preparing his Statement of Probable Cause, he never mentioned anything about eye contact or the lack thereof, about petitioner being nervous, or about his asking petitioner his name or address. In that Statement, Officer Moro noted his observation of the bulge in petitioner’s pocket and said that "due to the violent crimes that occur in this block, and the lighting being very poor, this officer became fearful that Mr. Ransome possessed a gun. This officer exited the vehicle to investigate and for officer safety conducted an outer garment patdown.” It is of interest that, although Officer Moro recited in his Statement that the lighting was poor, he stated in court that, although the north side of the street was not well lit, the south side, where petitioner was standing, was better lit and that he had no trouble seeing. It is also noteworthy that, although the actual fear expressed by Officer Moro came from the bulge in petitioner’s left front pocket, that was not the first place he patted. Moro went, instead, for the petitioner’s waist area and, only after finding a soft bulge there and concluding that it likely consisted of a controlled substance, did he search the pocket.