Thornton v. State, 189 A.3d 769

Background

Officers lawfully detained Thornton during a parking violation while he sat in a parked car; they ordered him out of the vehicle.
Officers observed what they described as furtive adjustments near Thornton’s waistband and sought consent to search the car; Thornton refused and officers said they would call a K-9 (a bluff).
Officer Zimmerman began a frisk by touching Thornton’s waistband; Thornton fled, slipped/fell shortly after, officers restrained/handcuffed him, and a handgun was found on the ground under him.
Thornton moved to suppress the handgun as the fruit of an unlawful Terry frisk; the circuit court found the frisk “arguably illegal” but denied suppression based on attenuation (flight as intervening circumstance) and lack of flagrant police misconduct.
Thornton pleaded not guilty, was convicted on agreed facts of possession of a regulated firearm by a felon, appealed the denial of the suppression motion, and this Court affirmed on attenuation grounds.

Issues

Issue	Thornton’s Argument	State’s Argument	Held
Whether a seizure/search had occurred before the gun was discovered	The pat-down (touch to waistband) was a Fourth Amendment search and thus unconstitutional if unsupported by reasonable suspicion	The Fourth Amendment seizure did not occur until after Thornton ran and was physically restrained (citing Hodari D.)	Court: Thornton was seized during the stop and the waistband touch constituted a search; Hodari D. did not defeat Thornton’s suppression claim because his challenge was to the prior frisk, not to continuous seizure
Whether officers had reasonable suspicion to frisk Thornton	Movements at the waistband, standing alone, did not supply reasonable suspicion (relying on Ransome and Jeremy P.)	Officer Zimmerman’s detailed observations plus training justified an objective inference Thornton was armed	Court: Assumed arguendo the officers lacked reasonable suspicion (circuit court was doubtful) and declined to resolve the issue because attenuation was dispositive
Whether Thornton’s flight constituted an intervening circumstance that attenuated the taint of any unlawful frisk	Flight caused by an illegal seizure should not automatically purge the taint; flight may be merely a reaction to illegality (citing Gallinger, Owens)	Flight here was a new, distinct criminal act (fleeing and eluding / possible battery) committed during a lawful traffic stop and provided independent probable cause to arrest/search	Court: Thornton’s flight (and possible push) amounted to a new crime (fleeing/eluding and assault), constituted an intervening circumstance, and supported a lawful second seizure that revealed the gun
Whether police misconduct was sufficiently flagrant to require exclusion despite attenuation	The frisk violated precedents (Jeremy P., Ransome) and was therefore sufficiently egregious to require suppression	Officers acted in good faith on specific observations; their conduct was not purposeful or flagrant	Court: Misconduct, if any, was not purposeful or flagrant; absence of flagrant misconduct plus intervening crime outweighed the close temporal proximity, so evidence was admissible

Key Cases Cited

Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968) (establishes stop-and-frisk reasonableness standard)
California v. Hodari D., 499 U.S. 621 (1991) (seizure requires physical force or submission to authority)
Utah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056 (2016) (attenuation factors: temporal proximity, intervening circumstances, flagrancy of misconduct)
Myers v. State, 395 Md. 261 (2006) (outstanding warrant as intervening circumstance that attenuates taint)
Ransome v. State, 373 Md. 99 (2003) (bulge/waistband observations alone generally insufficient for frisk)
In re Jeremy P., 197 Md. App. 1 (2011) (waistband adjustments typically do not create reasonable suspicion absent further specifics)
State v. Holt, 435 Md. 443 (2013) (new crimes committed after a stop can, case-by-case, attenuate taint)
Cox v. State, 421 Md. 630 (2011) (attenuation is fact-specific; no single factor is dispositive)