Dec. 29, 2009 – Police cannot justify temporarily detaining a person with handcuffs based on the mere fact that other police officers believe the individual was involved in an earlier crime, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals held.
In State v. Pickens, 2008AP1514, the court held on Dec. 23 that the police must provide specific and articulable facts justifying such an intrusive detention for the officer’s safety or similar concerns.
The court also held that a co-habitant’s consent to search a room does not extend to the containers over which there is no common authority, such as a safe. The court rejected an analogy to automobile searches in which consent extends to containers that could contain the object of the search.
Hotel investigation
Madison police began investigating whether a woman calling herself Stephanie Weix fraudulently used a credit card to rent a hotel room, but they soon learned additional facts suggesting illegal drug activity.
Specifically, the police failed to find Weix at the room in question, but they were greeted by a man identifying himself as Clifford Robinson and three other people. The police believed that drug users sometimes rent motel rooms without staying in them so that dealers can operate there for a while before moving to another motel.
When none of the room’s four occupants claimed to have a vehicle at the hotel, a police officer checked the hotel parking lot and found Sameeh Pickens sleeping in a car. The officer asked Pickens to step out of the car, and Pickens did so.
The officer had seen a flier in a police briefing room stating that Pickens was a suspect in a shooting incident. The officer handcuffed Pickens and placed him in the back of a squad car before returning to the hotel to continue the investigation.
About 40 minutes later, the officer returned and Pickens agreed to a search of his person. The search produced $1,700 in cash and keys to a second room at the hotel and to a safe in that room. When the police went to the second room, they met Bryana Clark, a woman who appeared to have been asleep inside. Clark consented to a search of the room which uncovered drugs and drug paraphernalia on top of and inside a dresser.
Using the key taken from Pickens, the police unlocked the safe and found cocaine base and heroin. Clark did not know anything about the safe and had no key to it.
Pickens moved to suppress the evidence he argued resulted from an illegal detention. The circuit court denied the motion and Pickens entered pleas to two counts of possession of cocaine with intent to deliver. Pickens then appealed the suppression rulings.
Articulable facts
In an opinion authored by Judge Paul Lundsten, the court of appeals faulted the prosecution for failing to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate the reasonableness of the detention.
Citing Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), the court noted that police may detain on the basis of a reasonable suspicion, grounded in “specific and articulable facts” yielding reasonable inferences of illegal activity. Likewise, police may rely on a bulletin to detain a person if the flier was issued on the basis of articulable facts supporting a reasonable suspicion that the wanted person committed an offense, the court said, citing U.S. v. Hensley, 469 U.S. 221 (1985).
From these cases, the court concluded that the reasonableness of a temporary detention cannot be found in just “the bare fact” that the detaining officer knew that other officers suspected an individual of involvement in prior criminal behavior. “[S]uch evidence does not provide specific, articulable facts to which the court can apply the reasonable suspicion standard,” the court of appeals wrote.
In this case, the court wrote, “[W]e do not know what the prosecutor could have presented to show that it was reasonable to suspect that Pickens was involved in a prior shooting; we only know that the prosecutor did not present such evidence.”
No basis for handcuffs
But the court explained it did not have to decide whether the police had reasonable suspicion to briefly detain Pickens in the hotel parking lot because even if the detention were proper, it became unreasonable in its level of restraint when Pickens was handcuffed and placed in the squad car.
With its conclusion that a reviewing court cannot consider the bare fact that the detained person was a suspect in another crime, the court of appeals rejected the state’s argument that the handcuffs were necessary for the officer’s safety. In this case, the court noted that the officer saw no evidence that Pickens had weapons nor did he observe Pickens make any sudden moves. Other than the bulletin, “the State points to no other facts justifying the use of handcuffs,” the court remarked.
As an aside, the court commented that the state did not argue that suspicion of illegal drug activity alone justified handcuffing a suspect. Consequently, the court said it would not decide that issue. “We note, however, that our research indicates that we would likely reject such an argument,” the court wrote, adding that illegal drugs and weapons frequently go hand in hand, but reasonable suspicion of drug activity by itself is generally insufficient to justify handcuffs.
Scope of authority, not scope of consent
The court found that the police learned of the second hotel room after speaking to Clifford Robinson, not by illegally detaining Pickens. Further, the court found that police reasonably believed Bryana Clark had common authority over the second room when she gave consent for a search. Accordingly, the court upheld the admission of drug evidence found on and in the dresser.
But the court held that drugs found in the safe should have been suppressed because the police would not have recovered them without first obtaining the key from Pickens. The court remarked that the state hoped to frame the issue to be whether Clark’s consent to a search of the room extended to the room’s safe. However, the court rejected an analogy to vehicle searches in which consent to search a car implies consent to examine containers potentially holding the object sought.
The court asked whether Clark had a connection with the safe that gave her the right to allow a search. “[T]he threshold question must be the scope of Clark’s authority, not the scope of her consent,” the court wrote.
Inevitable discovery
Although the circuit court found the police illegally searched the safe, it allowed the evidence because police argued that by the time they opened the safe, they had gathered enough information to obtain a warrant for the search.
The court of appeals reversed the circuit court, explaining that the doctrine of inevitable discovery requires police to have been actively pursuing the legal alternative prior to the unlawful search.
“If the existence of probable cause for a warrant excused the failure to obtain a warrant, the protection afforded by the warrant requirement would be much diminished,” the court wrote.
