Champion v. United States

307 A.3d 425

Juwan CHAMPION, Appellant,

v.UNITED STATES, Appellee.

No. 18-CF-1128

District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Argued October 14, 2020

Decided January 4, 2024

Appeal from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (2017-CF2-000808) (Hon. Danya A; Dayson, Trial Judge) (Hon. Juliet J. McKenna, Motions Judge)

Robin M. Earnest, appointed by this court, for appellant.

David P. Saybolt, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Jessie K. Liu, United States Attorney at the time, and Elizabeth Trosman, Suzanne Grealy Curt, and Julia Cosans, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief, for appellee.

Before Beckwith and Easterly, Associate Judges, and Glickman,^* Senior Judge

Dissenting Opinion by Senior Judge Glickman at pages 436–37.

Beckwith, Associate Judge:

Appellant Juwan Champion was a backseat passenger in a rideshare vehicle that police stopped for making a turn without signaling. When officers ordered Mr. Champion out of the car, he took off his jacket and left it on the empty seat before getting out. While one officer patted Mr. Champion down, another reached into the car, grabbed the jacket, and felt what he later confirmed was a handgun.

After the trial court denied Mr. Champion’s motion to suppress the gun, a jury convicted him of carrying a pistol without a license and other gun-related offenses.¹ Mr. Champion argues, among other things, that the trial court should have suppressed the gun because the officers violated his Fourth Amendment rights when they frisked the jacket containing the gun without particularized grounds for suspecting Mr. Champion was armed and dangerous. We agree and therefore reverse Mr. Champion’s convictions.

I.

At the suppression hearing, Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Officer Owais Akhtar testified that he and two other police officers—Officers Brian McCarthy and James Jacobs—were patrolling in an unmarked police vehicle one evening in January 2017. At about 6:10 p.m., they saw a blue Hyundai make a left turn without using a turn signal, and they pulled the car over.²

Officers Akhtar and McCarthy approached the driver’s side of the Hyundai as Officer Jacobs approached the passenger side. Besides the driver, there were four people in the vehicle—one in the front passenger seat and three in the backseat. When asked, the driver told the police that he worked for an online rideshare service and provided Officer Akhtar with his license and vehicle registration. Officer Akhtar testified that he noticed during this interaction that the passenger seated behind the driver—whom he later learned was Juwan Champion—"appeared nervous," "[h]is eyes were wide open," and "he was just holding his breath." Officer Akhtar knocked on the window and ordered this passenger to exit the vehicle "[b]ecause [he] wanted to talk to him to see why he was so nervous."

Before getting out of the car, Mr. Champion turned his body to his right—a move the officer called "blading"—propped his knee onto the passenger seat, and removed the jacket he was wearing by pulling each sleeve behind his back as he leaned forward toward the seat. As Mr. Champion was turning, Officer Akhtar opened the rear passenger door and twice asked him what he was doing. Mr. Champion said, "Nothing," and placed the jacket on the empty seat as he got out of the car. The middle rear passenger then placed the jacket next to his thigh.³

Officer Akhtar testified at the suppression hearing that he was "afraid that [Mr. Champion] might be discarding evidence or he might be armed" based on his "previous encounters with individuals who are armed." Officer Akhtar asked, "You ain’t got no guns on you, right?" and Mr. Champion answered, "Fuck no." Officer Akhtar testified that when he told Mr. Champion that police were going "to pat [him] down real quick okay," he heard Mr. Champion say "okay."When Officer Akhtar asked why he had taken the jacket off, Mr. Champion replied that "he was hot" and that "the jacket smelled like weed."

While Officer McCarthy frisked Mr. Champion outside the vehicle, Officer Akhtar reached into the backseat of the Hyundai and pulled the jacket from the car. He testified that his "attention [was] focused" on the jacket because he "wanted to make sure that if it was any type of evidence in the jacket it wasn’t discarded or other people, the rear passengers did not take anything out of the jacket or place it in the jacket." Officer Akhtar felt what he believed was an object "consistent with the shape of a handgun in the jacket" as he removed it from the vehicle. He then said the code word "7/11" to indicate the presence of a firearm and slid the jacket over the Hyundai’s roof toward Officer Jacobs. Police found a handgun with an extended magazine within the jacket’s left inner pocket.

In ruling on the motion to suppress the handgun, the trial court credited Officer Akhtar’s observations about Mr. Champion’s nervous demeanor, noting that Mr. Champion was the only passenger the officer ordered out of the car and so "there was something particularized about Mr. Champion’s presentation that caused him concern." The court described Mr. Champion’s movements as an "awkward" and "very obvious and blatant attempt to shed his jacket" and noted Officer Akhtar’s testimony that in his experience, the "turning of one’s body or an effort to discard clothing items is often consistent with an individual who is seeking to conceal contrabands including weapons." The trial court ultimately determined that the officers were justified in believing "that there was contraband concealed in the jacket" and that the outer patdown of the jacket did not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment.⁴ The court did not specifically find that Officer Akhtar had reason to believe that this contraband was a weapon or that Mr. Champion was armed and dangerous. The trial court permitted the government to introduce the gun at trial, where it became the main evidence supporting the jury’s conviction of Mr. Champion on all counts.

II.

[1, 2] The question before us is whether the trial court erred in concluding that the officers had legal authority under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), to take Mr. Champion’s jacket from the backseat and frisk it.⁵

We review that ruling de novo. Jackson v. United States, 56 A.3d 1206, 1209. (D.C. 2012).

[3–5] The Fourth Amendment protects "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." U.S. Const. amend. IV.⁶ Warrantless searches "are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment—subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions." Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 847, 357, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (footnote omitted). One such exception allows police officers to conduct a Terry patdown search of a person upon reasonable articulable. suspicion, that the person is armed and dangerous. Terry, 392 U.S. at 27, 88 S.Ct. 1868. This exception has been extended to the equivalent of a frisk of a vehicle’s passenger compartment during a lawful traffic stop. Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032, 1050-51, 103 S.Ct. 3469, 77 L.Ed.2d 1201 (1983) (upholding a search of the passenger compartment after police saw a weapon in plain view during a lawful traffic stop); id. at 1047, 103 S.Ct. 3469 ("Terry need not be read as restricting the preventative search to the person of the detained suspect."); Jackson, 56 A.3d at 1209.

[6–9] A passenger-compartment search allows officers to "search for weapons on something less than probable cause" where police possess "a reasonable belief based on specific and articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant the officers in believing that the suspect is dangerous and the suspect may gain immediate control of weapons." Jackson, 56 A.3d at 1209 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Long, 463 U.S. at 1049, 103 S.Ct. 3469); see Arizona v. Johnson, 555 U.S. 323, 326-27, 129 S.Ct. 781, 172 L.Ed.2d.694 (2009) ("[T]o proceed from a stop to a frisk, the police officer must reasonably suspect that the person stopped is armed and dangerous."). A protective search of a passenger compartment is justified only by the "danger [that] may arise from the possible presence of weapons in the area surrounding a suspect" and not an "interest in collecting and preserving evidence," which "is not present in the Terry context." Long, 463 U.S. at 1049 & n.14, 103 S.Ct. 3469. When an officer claims that he "reacted out of a need to take protective action," we must "ensure that the claim is objectively credible and reasonable when viewed through the officer’s eyes." (Wilbur) Johnson v. United States, 350 A.2d 738, 741(D.C. 1976); see also United States v. Hussain, 835 F.3d 307, 313 (2d Cir. 2016)’ (stating that a Terry search must be "genuinely protective"). In deciding whether an officer had "a ‘particularized and objective basis’ for his suspicion" that the suspect was armed and dangerous, we examine the "totality of the circumstances." Jackson, 56 A.3d at 1209 (quoting United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273, 122 S.Ct. 744, 151 L.Ed.2d 740 (2002)). "[S]pecificity in the information upon which police action is predicated is the central teaching of [the Supreme] Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence." Terry, 392 U.S. at 21 n.18, 88 S.Ct. 1868.

[10] In the view of the trial court here, Mr. Champion’s awkward removal of his jacket justified Officer Akhtar’s frisk of the jacket. The court singled out no other factors that supported reasonable suspicion to conduct a frisk except for noting that Mr. Champion’s perceptible nervousness led police to get him out of the car. Accordingly, although "we examine all … factors individually and collectively," Green v. United States, 662 A.2d 1388, 1390 (D.C. 1995), "because the circumstances would likely fall short of constituting reasonable suspicion in the absence of"...