Court Opinion

ID: 9541933
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:29:48.522118+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:05:22.376213
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion
DeBruler, J.
The stop and detention of the appellants by the police while driving in a car constitutes a seizure within the contemplation of that term in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As such it must meet the Fourth Amendment requirement of reasonableness. Terry v. Ohio (1968), 392 U.S. 1, 88 S. Ct. 1868, 20 L. Ed. 2d 889; Smithers v. State (1971), 256 Ind. 512, 269 N. E. 2d 874. General principles exist to guide us in making this judicial determination of reasonableness. In so doing it is well to recall that it is our function as judges to enforce the compact and thereby to preserve its values. It is the duty of a judge to align himself with those principles and values, and then apply the principles to the case before him. The need to adhere to this basic stance in consideration of Fourth Amendment issues is well explained in Coolidge v. New Hampshire (1970), 403 U.S. 443, 91 S. Ct. 2022, 29 L. Ed. 2d 564:
*563“In times of unrest, whether caused by crime or racial conflict or fear of internal subversion, this basic law and the values that it represents may appear unrealistic or ‘extravagant’ to some. But the values were those of the authors of our fundamental constitutional concepts. In times not altogether unlike our own they won — by legal and constitutional means in England, and by revolution on this continent — a right of personal security against arbitrary intrusions by official power. If times have changed, reducing every man’s scope to do as he pleases in an urban and industrial world, the changes have made the values served by the Fourth Amendment more, not less, important.” 403 U.S. at 455. .
The Supreme Court of the United States stated the specific standard for evaluating the reasonableness of a police officer’s action in effecting a personal seizure which falls short of an arrest, that is, “Would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure ‘warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief’ that the action taken was appropriate?” Terry v. Ohio, supra. Since the State did not have a warrant, the burden was upon it at the hearing on the motion to suppress, to establish that the police were justified in stopping the car and that the subsequent seizure of the shotgun from the car was not in violation of the Fourth Amednment. Smithers v. State, supra. The trial court specifically found in this case that the stop of the car in which appellants were driving, and the subsequent removal of them at gunpoint was justified, relying upon Terry v. Ohio, supra. The subsequent view of the shotgun by the officer through the car door left open by one of the appellants upon alighting, was therefore in the opinion of the trial court properly seized and admissible in evidence.
In my view, the trial court correctly found the facts, known to the officers at the moment they pulled appellants’ car over, but that the trial court erred in determining that these facts justified them in stopping the car. The trial court should have suppressed the physical evidence taken from the car, and such other evidence coming into the possession and knowledge of the police as a direct result of the illegal stop of the appellants.
*564The officers who stopped the car testified that they knew the following facts, and further that it was the following facts upon which they relied in making the decision to stop the car and its occupants:
(1) The Kings Crown Motel located on the Highway 52 by-pass in West Lafayette, Indiana was robbed at 9:55 p.m. by two Negro males, one armed with a sawed-off shotgun.
(2) The two Negro suspects were believed to be heading north on Highway 52 in a car.
(3) A single Negro male was seen by the stopping officers driving north in a car on State Road 53 away from the general direction of West Lafayette at a point fifteen miles from the Kings Crown Motel, about eighteen minutes after the robbery.
The officers, executing the seizure, first learned of the robbery by police car radio, while located six miles west and nine miles north of the Kings Crown Motel. They were at that time on State Road 18 in an adjoining county. They proceeded to the junction of State Road 18 and State Road 53, which junction is fifteen miles from the Kings Crown Motel. It was while waiting at this junction that the officers first observed appellants’ car and began following it. State Road 53 was described by one of the officers as a two lane highway running in a northerly direction. Appellant was stopped by the officers in the village of Wolcott which is situated along this highway. It is important to note here that the appellants’ vehicle was headed north on Highway 53 and not north on 52 as was indicated in the message. The record shows that Highway 52 runs in a general northwest direction toward Chicago, and intersects near West Lafayette with Highway 53, which runs in a northerly direction. It is therefore apparent that Highway 53 becomes just one of several roads which would provide egress to a person travelling in a northerly or northwesterly direction from West Lafayette, Indiana.
Immediately prior to the time of the stop of the car in which appellants were travelling, the police officers observed only that a lone Black male was driving a car travelling in *565the same general compass direction as had been reported, and that given the robbery and flight by car at 9:55 p.m. from the Kings Crown Motel, such escape car leaving the Kings Crown Motel at 9:55 p.m. might reasonably reach a point fifteen miles away in eighteen minutes.
The officers had no description of any sort of the type or color of the car believed to be carrying the suspects north on Highway 52. The suspects were described by message only as two Black males. Both officers testified that they relied upon their experience and the facts that a person whom they thought might be a Black male was headed in a northerly direction away from West Lafayette in a car, which when observed, was about eighteen minutes from the motel. One of the officers was unable to decide what the apparent race of the driver was. There was no more accurate description of the suspects upon which the officer relied in making the stop. And they had no accurate description of the road upon which the car was travelling. Road 53 is merely one of the possible routes which the suspects might possibly take when fleeing north. Recapping, then, there was no accurate description of the suspects, the car, or the road upon which they were travelling. Under these circumstances I would hold that the trial court erred in sustaining the constitutionality of the seizure of appellants and in adjudging that the evidence seized as a direct result thereof from the car was admissible against appellants. I would therefore order a new trial.
The error made by the majority here, is its failure to recognize that this case is distinguished from Terry and the related cases following it. The exercise by police of the authority to forcibly detain and question persons on less than probable cause, has only been granted where the facts known to the officer, establish that suspicious conduct or criminal conduct has occurred, and also identify the person so conducting himself. Where, as here, the police officer does not observe the conduct, the identifying facts must be particularized and clearly point out the person to be detained.
*566In Terry, Officer McFadden personally observed the suspicious conduct of John Terry. In Smithers, the officers saw how the defendants looked, and observed their conduct. In Adams v. Williams (1972), 407 U.S. 143, 92 S. Ct. 1921, 32 L. Ed. 2d 612, Robert Williams was physically pointed out to Sgt. Connolly on the street, and Sgt. Connolly immediately walked over and confronted him. In Luckett v. State (1972), 259 Ind. 174, 284 N. E. 2d 738, we found justification for a stop of individuals in a car in an aggregation of circumstantial evidence, including a license number prefix and color of car. Luckett teeters precariously on the brink of unconstitutionality. To me Luckett marks the final outer limits of the zone of permissible detention, questioning, and searching permitted to be carried on by agents of the State without probable cause. The majority in Adams, perceived the requirement of a particularized description of the suspected person when they suggest that an investigatory detention is warranted when the victim of a street crime seeks the aid of a policeman and gives a description of the assailant. In the cases of Gaines v. Craven, 448 F. 2d 1236 (9th Cir., 1971), and U.S. v. Unverzagt, 424 F. 2d 396 (8th Cir., 1970), relied upon heavily by the Adams majority, the identifying facts unquestionably focused upon the persons detained.
Finally, the Terry rule has been held inappropriate in hypothetical circumstances such as those described in the majority opinion. In Davis v. Mississippi (1969), 394 U.S. 721, 89 S. Ct. 1394, 22 L. Ed. 2d 676, the U.S. Supreme Court condemned as illegal, the type of indiscriminate drag-netting by police officers which the majority of this Court now sanctions. That court in condemning the use of investigatory dragnets appropriately and wisely adjudged that such group seizures:
“would subject unlimited numbers of innocent persons to the harrassment and ignominy incident to involuntary detention. Nothing is more clear than that the Fourth Amendment was meant to prevent wholesale intrusions upon the personal security of our citizenry, whether these in*567trusions be termed ‘arrests’ or investigatory detentions’.” 394 U.S. at 726-727.
Without intending to detract to any degree from the very serious nature of the issues involved in this case, I would state my own presumption. It is that the type of unwarranted intrusion upon the Fourth Amendment rights of Indiana citizenry sanctioned by the majority today will survive only until the first time in a large department store during the Christmas rush, it is announced over the loudspeaker system:
“Ladies and Gentlemen: The jewelry department has just been robbed by a white male. No one will be permitted to leave or enter the store. All white males now in the store will please go and line up at the rear wall of the basement level. You will then face the wall and lean up against it with both hands, at a forty-five degree angle, and spread your feet wide apart. You will then await a police officer, who will pat you down and take your name, address, age, place of employment, and social security number. You will then be permitted to leave.”
I therefore dissent.
Note. — Reported in 307 N. E. 2d 457.