Edwin v. State

RAHEEN EDWIN v. STATE OF MARYLAND

No. 770

COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND

September Term, 2019

July 24, 2020

Circuit Court for Washington County

Case No. C-21-CR-18-000553

UNREPORTED

Kehoe, Wells, Raker, Irma S. (Senior Judge, Specially Assigned) JJ.

Opinion by Kehoe, J.

*This is an unreported opinion, and it may not be cited in any paper, brief, motion or other document filed in this Court or any other Maryland Court as either precedent within the rule of stare decisis or as persuasive authority. See Md. Rule 1-104.

After a jury trial in the Circuit Court for Washington County, the Honorable Brett R. Wilson, presiding, the appellant, Raheen Edwin, was convicted of various drug offenses. Edwin's appeal to this Court presents two questions for our review, which we have reworded:

1. Did the circuit court err in denying Edwin's motion to suppress incriminating evidence found on his person and in his vehicle during a warrantless search incident to his warrantless arrest?

2. Did the circuit court abuse its discretion by improperly limiting closing argument by Edwin's counsel?¹

We answer no to both questions and affirm the circuit court's judgments of conviction.

Background

The basic facts of this case are not in contention. The following narrative is derived from the findings of the circuit court and the testimony credited by the court in the suppression hearing.

This case began with a controlled narcotics buy organized by officers of the Washington County Narcotics Task Force. On April 19, 2018, these officers outfitted a "trustworthy" confidential informant with audio- and video-surveillance equipment andgave him $160 in marked bills. The informant was then sent, in his own car, to purchase heroin from Heather Dell, a "middleman" who was the subject of a task-force investigation.

At around 3:30 that afternoon, the informant parked his car near the Dagmar Hotel in downtown Hagerstown. He was on Summit Avenue, just south of its intersection with Antietam Street. From their own cars, also parked on Summit Avenue, about half a block behind the informant's car, task-force officers were listening in—and watching what they could.

The informant called Dell, and a few minutes later, Dell was sitting next to him in the front passenger seat of his car. Dell told the informant that her supplier—an unnamed "he"—had not yet arrived. She also said that she had to get hold of her "girlfriend." Dell called this girlfriend, later identified as Amy Coolahan. Coolahan approached the informant's car moments later. After some conversation, Coolahan told Dell and the informant that she would go get the heroin for them. So that Coolahan could pay for the heroin, the informant gave her $100 dollars of the marked currency provided by the task force. As collateral, Coolahan left behind her pocketbook and a knapsack she had been carrying.

Coolahan said she would return in a few minutes and left the car on foot. As she turned the corner to walk down Antietam Street, the officers monitoring the buy lost sight of her. That's when Officer Frank Toston, the lead agent on the case, directed Officers Bryan Teets and Mikhael Weaver to follow her in their car. Toston believed that Coolahan was taking the money to buy the heroin from the unnamed "he" that Dell had mentioned earlier.

Following Toston's orders, Teets and Weaver circled the block to get an eye on Coolahan. As Teets would later testify, it took the officers "[l]ess than a minute" to get to a spot where they could see her again. When they did see her, Coolahan was standing one or two feet away from an unknown black man wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt. This unknown man would later be identified as the appellant, Edwin. Coolahan and Edwin were facing each other when they were first spotted by police, but the pair almost immediately separated. Coolahan turned to walk back to the informant's car, and Edwin began to walk toward a nearby parking lot.

Critically, the officers never saw any physical contact or exchange between Coolahan and Edwin. Weaver would later testify that Coolahan and Edwin were "close together," positioned "as if they were conversing." But any apparent interaction was "very brief," Teets would testify. "By the time we got up to the intersection," Teets would say, "[it] looked like they had just finished whatever they were doing." But as it was happening, Teets and Weaver told Toston what little they saw, and Toston directed the officers to "maintain visual" on Edwin.

At the time, Toston was still parked behind the informant's car on Summit Avenue, listening to the informant and Dell. When Coolahan returned to the informant's car, she told Dell and the informant that she had the heroin. In exchange for two baggies "stamped with black Maltese crosses," the informant returned Coolahan's belongings. Dell then got out of the car, and the two women started to walk away.

Within a few seconds, Toston and another officer stopped the women for questioning. When Toston asked Coolahan where she got the suspected heroin, she said she got it from "a black male who was wearing a gray colored sweatshirt." She also said she knew this man as "Mike." Toston relayed this information to Teets and Weaver, who confirmed the man they were following—the man who they had seen face to face with Coolahan a few minutes before—was a black man in a gray sweatshirt. That's when Toston instructed Teets and Weaver to move in on Edwin.

By the time Teets and Weavers approached Edwin, Edwin was standing outside a blue Toyota SUV parked in a parking lot for employees of the District Court for Washington County. Teets and Weaver asked Edwin for his driver's license. And shortly after he reached into the center console of the SUV and handed the officers his learner's permit—revealing his name was not "Mike"—the officers, with Toston's go-ahead, arrested him under suspicion of narcotics distribution.

Incident to Edwin's arrest, Teets and Weaver searched Edwin's person and "the immediate area of his vehicle." On Edwin's person, they found $100 cash—later established to be the same buy money that the informant had given Coolahan minutes before—and a phone. In the center console of Edwin's car, police discovered a plastic bag with five small zip-lock bags inside, each containing an off-white powder substance. These bags were similarly marked with black Maltese crosses, although a later test of one of the bags showed it contained cocaine and not heroin.

As a result of these events, Edwin was charged with (1) conspiracy to distribute heroin, (2) distribution of heroin, (3) possession with intent to distribute cocaine, (4) possession of cocaine, and (5) use of drug paraphernalia to store cocaine. His effort to have suppressed the incriminating evidence found on his person and in his car was unsuccessful. And on the basis of this and other evidence, Edwin was convicted by a Washington County jury of all counts (save the drug-paraphernalia charge nolle prossed by the prosecution). The circuit court sentenced Edwin to 25 years' imprisonment.

Edwin filed a timely appeal to this Court, assigning as error the circuit court's denial of his pretrial motion to suppress and a limitation imposed by the circuit court during defense counsel's closing argument at trial. In our analysis below, we provide additional factual context.

Analysis

A. The denial of the motion to suppress

At a pretrial suppression hearing, Edwin asked the court to exclude as evidence the buy money and the phone found on his person, as well as the baggies of suspected cocaine found in his car.² He argued to the circuit court that police secured this evidence through a search conducted incident to a warrantless arrest not supported by probable cause, inviolation of the Fourth Amendment. That the arrest was unlawful made any search incident to that arrest—whether of Edwin's person or of the reachable area in his car—unlawful too. Insofar as the search of Edwin's car was considered separately as a warrantless automobile search under the doctrine of Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132 (1925), and its progeny, Edwin argued, the evidence that search yielded should be excluded as "fruit of the poisonous tree" under the doctrine of Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (1963).

Before ruling on the suppression motion, the circuit court heard the testimony of three witnesses—task-force officers Toston, Teets and Weaver—who relayed the events we outlined above. Edwin did not testify or call witnesses of his own. Based on this testimony, the circuit court sided with the prosecution.

In his findings, the judge pointed out weaknesses in the State's case. First, as the officers freely admitted in their testimony, police lost sight of Coolahan twice: "both when they went around the block and then when they went to follow [Edwin]." Coolahan was moving through the streets unseen by police for at least a minute or two. Second, police never saw any direct contact or exchange between Coolahan and Edwin. When Teets and Weaver spotted Coolahan and Edwin, the suspects were "face-to-face about one or two feet apart," but they then "immediately turned from each other and walked away." Additionally, the court found that Coolahan's description of her supplier had been "very, very slight."

Nevertheless, the court concluded, "based on the . . . totality of the circumstances," that once police confirmed that Edwin fit this "very limited . . . two-prong description ofblack male and gray sweatshirt," they had probable cause to arrest Edwin for supplying heroin to Coolahan. The court explained (emphasis added):

[T]his all happened within just a very brief few moments. . . . We know that . . . both Agents Teets and Weaver were very clear that when they came around the block, . . . there were two people there—there was the defendant and there is Ms. Coolahan and there was no one else. They saw no one else walking away or towards Ms. Coolahan even though they lost eyesight on Ms. Coolahan,

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