Taylor v. State

TAYLOR v. STATE (NO. 75, SEPT TERM. 2015)
Under Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009), when a police officer validly arrests a
motorist for driving under the influence of alcohol, in the absence of facts indicating
otherwise, the officer, based on his or her knowledge and experience, may reasonably
conclude that open containers or other evidence bearing on the DUI offense may be present
in the passenger compartment of the vehicle and conduct a search for such evidence, even
though the defendant has been safely secured and has no access to the vehicle.
Circuit Court for IN THE COURT OF APPEALS
Dorchester County OF MARYLAND
Case No. K13-014979
Argued 4/4/16 No. 75
September Term, 2015
EFRAIN TAYLOR
vs.
STATE OF MARYLAND
Barbera, C.J.
*Battaglia
Greene
Adkins
McDonald
Watts
Wilner, Alan M. (Retired, Specially
Assigned)
JJ.
Opinion by Wilner, J.
Filed: May 23, 2016
*Battaglia, J., now retired, participated in the
hearing and conference of this case while an
active member of this Court; after being recalled
pursuant to the Constitution, Article IV, Section
3A, she also participated in the decision and
adoption of this opinion.
Petitioner was convicted in the Circuit Court for Dorchester County of possession
with intent to distribute cocaine and driving under the influence of alcohol. As a repeat
drug offender, he was sentenced to a significant term in prison. His sole complaint in this
appeal is that the search of his car following a traffic stop, which led to the discovery of
the cocaine, was Constitutionally deficient. The trial court denied his motion to suppress
the drugs and the Court of Special Appeals affirmed the ensuing judgment of conviction.
In reviewing a trial court’s ruling on a motion to suppress, we defer to that court’s
findings of fact unless we determine them to be clearly erroneous, and, in making that
determination, we view the evidence in a light most favorable to the party who prevailed
on that issue, in this case the State. We review the trial court’s conclusions of law,
however, and its application of the law to the facts, without deference. Varriale v. State,
444 Md. 400, 410, 119 A.3d 824, 830 (2015), citing Hailes v. State, 442 Md. 488, 499,
113 A.3d 608, 614 (2015); also Holt v. State, 435 Md. 443, 457, 78 A.3d 415, 423
(2013). There were no material disputes regarding the relevant facts in this case. The
issue is purely one of law – whether the officer’s search of the car as an incident to
appellant’s arrest was permissible under the Supreme Court’s holding in Arizona v. Gant,
556 U.S. 332, 129 S. Ct. 1710, 173 L. Ed. 2d 485 (2009) (hereafter Gant).
Officer Chad Mothersell, of the Cambridge Police Department, stopped petitioner
at about 1:00 in the morning after observing him speeding and failing to stop at a stop
sign. Although at trial, petitioner claimed he had not been speeding, the validity of the
stop is not at issue in this appeal. Officer Mothersell – the only witness at the
suppression hearing – said that, when he approached the passenger side of the vehicle
following the stop, he detected a minor odor of alcohol coming from petitioner’s breath
and person, even though petitioner was several feet away, in the driver’s seat. Mothersell
observed that petitioner’s speech was slurred and hard to understand and that his eyes
were bloodshot and glassy. When Mothersell asked for appellant’s registration card, he
was handed an insurance card. Petitioner said that he had been at the Point Break bar in
Cambridge.
Mothersell had petitioner exit the car so he could perform standard field sobriety
tests, which appellant did not complete successfully. At that point, he was placed under
arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol. Just then, a backup officer arrived.
Mothersell placed petitioner in the rear seat of his squad car to advise him of his rights
regarding whether to take a breath test and, while that was happening, the backup officer
searched appellant’s car and found the cocaine inside the front seat center armrest.
Mothersell said that the sole purpose for the search was to locate any “other
alcohol, open containers, anything pertaining to the DUI arrest.” When asked, on cross
examination, whether he had any reason to believe that there might be open containers in
the car, he said that there was a “good possibility” – that he had “several DUI arrests
where there’s plenty of open containers left in the vehicle.” On this evidence, defense
counsel argued that, under Gant, the search was unlawful because there was no
independent probable cause for such a search, which, he claimed, Gant requires. The
court disagreed and, as noted, denied the motion to suppress.
2
The starting point for analyzing the validity of a warrantless search is the
underlying precept that “searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior
approval by a judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment
– subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.” Gant,
supra, 556 U.S. at 338, 129 S. Ct. at 1716, 173 L. Ed.2d at 493, quoting from Katz v.
United States, 389 U.S. 347, 357, 88 S. Ct. 507, 514, 19 L. Ed. 2d 576, 585 (1967). One
of those exceptions is a search incident to a valid arrest, which “derives from interests in
officer safety and evidence preservation that are typically implicated in arrest situations.”
Gant, 556 U.S. at 338, 129 S. Ct. at 1716, 173 L. Ed.2d at 493.
Gant was intended to clarify the scope of that exception in the context of a motor
vehicle search. Mr. Gant was arrested for driving on a suspended license. After he had
been handcuffed and locked in a police car, officers searched Gant’s car and found
cocaine in the pocket of a jacket on the back seat. The issue was whether such a search,
under those circumstances, where it was virtually impossible for Gant to have accessed
his car to retrieve either weapons or evidence, could be justified under the holdings in
Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 89 S. Ct. 2034, 23 L. Ed. 2d 685 (1969) and New
York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454, 101 S. Ct. 2860, 69 L. Ed. 2d 768 (1981), and the Court
held that the search in that case could not be justified.
In Chimel, the Court limited the scope of a warrantless search incident to an arrest
to the arrestee’s person and the area within his or her “immediate control” – the area
“from within which he [or she] might gain possession of a weapon or destructible
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evidence.” 395 U.S. at 763, 89 S. Ct. at 2034, 23 L. Ed. 2d at 694. Belton exposed some
ambiguity in what the limitation of “immediate control” meant in the context of vehicle
passenger compartment searches. In Belton, an officer stopped a vehicle containing four
occupants. While asking for the operator’s driver’s license, he smelled burnt marijuana
and observed an envelope in the vehicle marked “Supergold,” a name he associated with
marijuana. Concluding that he had probable cause to believe that the occupants had
committed a drug offense, he ordered them out of the car, placed them under arrest,
patted them down, and separated them from each other, but did not handcuff them. He
then searched the car and found cocaine in the pocket of a jacket on the back seat.
The New York Court of Appeals held that, once the occupants were arrested, the
car and its contents were safely in the exclusive control of the police and that the search
therefore was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court granted certiorari because it found
that lower courts throughout the country had been unable to agree on a workable
definition of “the area within the immediate control of the arrestee” when that area might
include the interior of an automobile. The Belton Court settled the issue – or thought that
it had – by holding that, when an officer lawfully arrests the occupant of an automobile,
the officer, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, may search the passenger
compartment of the car and any containers therein. That conclusion was based on the
assumption that “articles inside the relatively narrow compass of the passenger
compartment of an automobile are in fact generally, even if not inevitably, within the area
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into which an arrestee might reach.” Belton, 453 U.S. at 460, 101 S. Ct. at 2864, 69 L.
Ed.2d at 774-75.
Belton did not solve the problem. As the Court noted in Gant, Belton had “been
widely understood to allow a vehicle search incident to the arrest of a recent occupant
even if there is no possibility the arrestee could gain access to the vehicle at the time of
the search.” The Gant Court rejected that view which, it said, would “untether the rule
from the justifications underlying the Chimel exception,” and held instead that the
“Chimel rationale authorizes police to search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant’s
arrest only when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger
compartment at the time of the search.” Gant, at 343, 129 S. Ct. at 1719, 173 L. Ed.2d at
496.
Had the Court stopped there, we would be obliged to reverse the suppression order
of the trial court in this case, as petitioner urges us to do. But the Court did not stop
there. In the very next sentence, it added that, although it does not follow from Chimel,
“circumstances unique to the vehicle context justify a search incident to a lawful arrest
when it is ‘reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be
found in the vehicle.’” Id, quoting from Justice Scalia’s concurring Opinion in Thornton
v. United States, 541 U.S. 615, 632, 124 S. Ct. 2127, 2137, 158 L. Ed. 2d 905, 920 (2004)
(Emphasis added). That is the holding relevant to this case. We are not concerned with
the Chimel “wingspan” but with whether Officer Mothersell reasonably could have
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believed that evidence relevant to the crime of driving under the influence of alcohol –
the crime for which petitioner was arrested – might be found in the vehicle.
The Gant Court noted that, in many cases when a recent occupant is arrested for a
traffic violation, there will be no reasonable basis to believe that the vehicle contains
further relevant evidence of that offense, but that in other cases, including Belton and
Thornton, “the offense of arrest will supply a basis for searching the passenger
compartment of an arrestee’s vehicle and any containers therein.” Gant, at 344, 129 S.
Ct. at 1719, 173 L. Ed. 2d at 496 (Emphasis added). Gant was arrested for driving on a
suspended license, an offense for which, on the record in that case, the police could not
reasonably expect to find any further evidence in the passenger compartment; hence,
there was no basis for the search. Belton and Thornton, on the other hand, were arrested
for drug violations, for which there was a greater expectation of finding further evidence
in the vehicle.
The issue here, of course, is whether an arrest for driving under the influence of
alcohol, under the circumstances of this case, can reasonably lead to an expectation that
further evidence of that offense may be found in the passenger compartment. Petitioner
argues that what the Supreme Court must have meant when it defined the standard for
conducting a vehicle search as an incident to a lawful arrest as whether it is “reasonable
to believe evidence of the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle” is that the officer
must have a “reasonable articulable suspicion” in that regard – the same level of
suspicion that would justify a temporary investigative detention or a frisk for weapons.
6
Having equated “reasonable to believe” with reasonable articulable suspicion,
petitioner contends that reasonable articulable suspicion cannot be based on or tied to the
nature of the crime for which the defendant was arrested because, if that were so, it would
allow the police carte blanche authority to search vehicles without any reasonable
articulable suspicion for one category of crimes but not for another. He accuses the State
of positing a per se rule -- a “dichotomy” between offenses that may yield physical
evidence and offenses that may not, which, he contends, “relies on a hyper-literal reading
of Gant that ignores the abhorrence of suspicionless searches for evidence and the
rejection of general searches incident to arrest.”
Petitioner’s argument raises a fair question of what, exactly, the Gant Court meant
in holding that the police may search the vehicle when it is “reasonable to believe” that
evidence of the crime for which the defendant was arrested may be discovered and
coupling that with the observation that some offenses “will supply a basis for searching
the passenger compartment” while others will not. Did the Court intend “reasonable to
believe” to be the equivalent of “reasonable articulable suspicion,” and, if it did, why did
it not simply use the latter term, which it had created and was already well-known to the
judicial and law enforcement community? Whether it did or did not intend such
equivalence, was its immediately ensuing language meant to suggest that certain crimes
will, of themselves, supply a right to conduct the search, without any independent basis
for a reasonable suspicion that further evidence of the crime may be found in the vehicle?
7
In State v. Ewertz, 305 P.3d 23, 26-27 (Kan. App. 2013), the Kansas court noted
that courts had, indeed, taken two different approaches on the issue – one interpreting
“reasonable to believe” as creating “an almost categorical link between the nature of the
crime of arrest and the right to search,” and the other interpreting that language as “akin
to reasonable suspicion,” citing People v. Nattoli, 199 Cal. App. 4th 531, 553 (2011) as
exemplifying the first approach and United States v. Taylor, 49 A.3d 818, 822-24 (D.C.
2012) and People v. Chamberlain, 229 P.3d 1054, 1057 (Colo. 2010) as supporting the
second. Ultimately, the Supreme Court may need to clarify what it meant and, given the
vast number of traffic stops that occur every day throughout the country, we hope that it
will do so.
We do know that other courts have sustained passenger compartment searches,
under Gant, following an arrest for driving under the influence or driving while
intoxicated, on the premise that there is reason to believe that other evidence of that
offense may be found in the vehicle. See State v. Cantrell, 233 P.3d 178 (Idaho App.
2010); State v. Ewertz, supra, 305 P.3d 23; Cain v. State. 373 S.W.3d 392 (Ark. App.
2010); United States v. Washington, 670 F.3d 1321 (D.C. Cir. 2012); and United States v.
Oliva, 2009 WL 1918458 (U.S.Dist. Ct. S.D. Texas (2009) (unreported).
We agree with that result in this case, but not on the basis of any per se right to
search founded solely on the nature of the offense. We conclude that the “reasonable to
believe” standard is the equivalent of reasonable articulable suspicion because we cannot
discern any logical difference between the two. If a police officer has a reasonable
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suspicion that he or she can articulate that something is so, then perforce it is reasonable
for the officer to believe that it may be so and vice versa. But that suspicion, to be
reasonable, must have some basis in fact.
In this case there was, and, we suspect, in most cases of an arrest for driving under
the influence, there is likely to be, a basis in fact – the arresting officer’s own prior
experiences or his or her knowledge of the experience of fellow officers, which can be
articulated, of finding open containers or other evidence related to the offense inside the
passenger compartment. It is a solid part of “reasonable articulable suspicion” law that
reasonable suspicion may be derived from an officer’s own experience or his or her
knowledge of the experience of other officers. See Holt v. State, 435 Md. 443, 461, 78
A.3d 415, 425 (2013), noting the statement in United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 418,
101 S. Ct. 690, 695, 66 L. Ed. 2d 621, 629 (1981) that evidence “must be seen and
weighed not in terms of library analysis by scholars, but as understood by those versed in
the field of law enforcement” and concluding that the court must “assess the evidence
through the prism of an experienced law enforcement officer, and give due deference to
the training and experience of [the officer].”
On this basis, we shall affirm the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals.1
JUDGMENT OF COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS
AFFIRMED; PETITIONER TO PAY THE COSTS.
1
The Court of Special Appeals, though affirming the judgment of conviction entered in
the Circuit Court, remanded the case for resentencing. That aspect of the intermediate
appellate court’s judgment is not before us.
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