United States v. StanfieldUnited States v. Stanfield
Before HAMILTON, LUTTIG, and WILLIAMS, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Luttig wrote the opinion, in which Judges Hamilton and Williams joined.
COUNSEL
OPINION
LUTTIG, Circuit Judge:
Law enforcement officials literally risk their lives each time they approach occupied vehicles during the course of investigative traffic stops. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly observed, “a significant percentage of murders of police officers occurs when officers are making traffic stops.” United States v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 218, 234 n.5 (1973). In recognition of the extraordinary dangers to which officers are exposed during such encounters, the Court has consistently accorded officers wide latitude to protect their safety, authorizing them, inter alia, to routinely order both drivers and passengers to exit their vehicles during such stops and to conduct the equivalent of “frisks” of automobile interiors whenever they reasonably believe their safety might be in jeopardy.
The advent of tinted automobile windows, however, has threatened to bring to naught these essential law enforcement protections. Confronted with the grave risk that tinted windows pose to the safety of law enforcement personnel, we address herein whether the government‘s substantial interest in officer safety during a lawful traffic stop outweighs the intrusion on the privacy interests of the vehicle‘s occupants which results when, because of heavily tinted windows that prevent the interior compartment from being viewed, an officer opens a door of the vehicle in order to ensure that the vehicle‘s driver is unarmed and that there are no other occupants who might threaten his safety during the investigatory stop. We conclude that, perhaps generally, but at least under the circumstances of this case, the substantial government interest in officer safety which exists when law enforcement officers must approach vehicles with heavily tinted windows far outweighs any minimal privacy interest the suspect retains in the otherwise visible interior compartment of his vehicle.
I.
At approximately 9:00 a.m. on the morning of April 29, 1996, three officers from the Baltimore City Police Department—Officers Mackel, Buie and Hamel—were patrolling a high crime area in West Baltimore known for its open narcotics trafficking when they saw a late model, black Nissan Pathfinder with heavily tinted windows illegally parked in the middle of the street, effectively blocking traffic. See
The officers approached Stanfield‘s Pathfinder from both the driver and passenger sides, and, as they did so, they noticed that the front driver‘s side window was down, but that the front passenger side window was raised. See Stanfield, 906 F. Supp. at 301, 303. The tinting on the Pathfinder‘s windows was so dark that Officer Mackel, who was approaching on the passenger‘s side, could not see into the vehicle. See id. at 302, 303. Nor could Officers Buie and Hamel see much of the vehicle‘s interior during their approach from the driver‘s side. As a consequence of the officers’ inability to see inside the vehicle as they approached, Officer Mackel opened the front passenger side door of Stanfield‘s vehicle in order to determine
Prior to trial, Stanfield moved to suppress the cocaine seized from the back seat of his Pathfinder, contending that the search effected by Officer Mackel‘s opening of the front passenger door was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment and, therefore, that the cocaine discovered as a consequence of that search must be suppressed. Following an evidentiary hearing, the district court denied the motion, upholding the search on two independent grounds. First, citing Texas v. Brown, 460 U.S. 730, 740 (1983), the district court held that Officer Mackel‘s opening of the passenger side door was permissible because Stanfield did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the interior of his car. See Stanfield, 906 F. Supp. at 304 n.9. Second, the district court held that, under Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032 (1983), “Officer Mackel was Constitutionally permitted to open the door to determine whether there were other[ ] [occupants in the vehicle] and if any weapons were within Stanfield‘s immediate reach,” determinations which the district court found were otherwise virtually impossible because of the heavy window tinting. Stanfield, 906 F. Supp. at 304; see also id. at 303-04 & n.11 (“[B]ecause Officer Mackel was unable to see through the heavily tinted windows of the Pathfinder, he had an objectively reasonable belief that Stanfield (or a hidden passenger) was potentially dangerous.“).
Following the district court‘s denial of Stanfield‘s suppression motion, Stanfield pled guilty to one count of possession, reserving the right to appeal the district court‘s suppression ruling that is now before us. For the reasons that follow, we affirm.
II.
“[T]he `touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness.‘” Ohio v. Robinette, 117 S. Ct. 417, 421 (1996) (quoting Florida v. Jimeno, 500 U.S. 248, 250 (1991)). And, as the Court explained in Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106 (1977), reasonableness “depends `on a balance between the public interest and the individual‘s right to personal security free from arbitrary interference by law officers.‘” Id. at 109 (quoting United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 878 (1975)). Under this balancing test, the Supreme Court has consistently approved of protective searches of persons, vehicles, and even homes, during routine and other lawful investigatory detentions, in recognition of the paramount interest in officer safety and the extraordinary
Thus, for example, in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), the Court sanctioned the now-familiar “pat-down” search, or “frisk,” because of the “immediacy” of the government‘s interest in officer safety, notwithstanding its conclusion that “[e]ven a limited search of the outer clothing for weapons constitutes a severe . . . intrusion upon cherished personal security,” id. at 24-25. If an officer possesses a reasonable belief based on “specific and articulable facts” that the suspect is potentially dangerous, id. at 21, reasoned the Court, then the officer is justified in undertaking the “limited steps” necessary to “protect himself and others from possible danger.” Id. at 28.
Fifteen years later, in Long, the Court authorized what are essentially “frisks” of automobile interiors during traffic stops, see Maryland v. Buie, 494 U.S. 325, 332 (1990), holding that such protective searches are “justified by thе principles . . . established in Terry.” Long, 463 U.S. at 1046. Recognizing that all “investigative detentions involving suspects in vehicles are especially fraught with danger to police officers,” id. at 1047, and accepting without discussion that an area search of a vehicle is less intrusive than the frisk of the person, the Court concluded that “the balancing required by Terry clearly weighs in favor of allowing the police to conduct an area search of the passenger compartment to uncover weapons, as long as they possess [a] reasonable belief that the suspect is potentially dangerous.” Id. at 1051.2
In Mimms and Maryland v. Wilson, 117 S. Ct. 882 (1997), the Court even adopted bright-line rules that officers may, as a matter of course, order both drivers and passengers from vehicles during routine traffic stops in order to ensure that such stops are completed without incident.
The Court in Mimms held that the “inordinate risk” that exists every time “an officer . . . approaches a person seated in an automobile,” 434 U.S. at 110, justifies a per se rule that drivers may be оrdered out of their vehicles during lawful traffic stops, whether or not there exists any particular reason under the circumstances to believe that officer safety might be in jeopardy. In contrast to the substantial state interest in safety at stake when officers must approach a stopped vehicle, the Court characterized the additional intrusion on personal liberty occasioned by requiring drivers to exit their vehicles and to move off onto the shoulder of the road as “de minimis,” “at most a mere inconvenience,” id. at 111, and “hardly ris[ing] to the level of a `petty indignity,‘” id. (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 17), reasoning that “[t]he driver is being asked to expose to view very little more . . . than is already exposed” when the driver is seated in his automobile. Id.
Finally, repeating its oft-repeated observation that the government has a “legitimate” and “weighty” interest in officer safety, the Court in Wilson recently expanded the Mimms per se rule to allow officers to order not only drivers, but all occupants, to exit vehicles and move off onto the shoulder of the road during routine traffic stops. See 117 S. Ct. at 886. While acknowledging that the passengers’ liberty interests implicated by orders to exit vehicles might be stronger than those of the drivers, the Court nonetheless readily concluded that these interests likewise are “minimal” and necessarily must yield to the state‘s interest in officer safety, finding persuasive Maryland‘s common-sense argument that every occupant in a vehicle “increases the possible sources of harm to the officer.” Id.
A.
1.
Notwithstanding that the Court “generally eschew[s] bright-line rules in the Fourth Amendment context,” id. at 885 n.1; see also Robinette, 117 S. Ct. at 421, we believe that the Court‘s decisions in Mimms and Wilson in particular would support a holding that whenever, during a lawful traffic stop, officers are required to approach a vehicle with windows so heavily tinted that they are unable to view the interior of the stopped vehicle, they may, when it appears in their experienced judgment prudent to do so, open at least one of the vehicle‘s doors and, without crossing the plane of thе vehicle, visually inspect its interior in order to ascertain whether the driver is armed, whether he has access to weapons, or whether there are other occupants of the vehicle who might pose a danger to the officers. Indeed, it seems to us that a contrary holding would not only be irreconcilable with, but arguably undermine altogether, the caselaw from the Supreme Court that was developed specifically for the purpose of protecting officer safety during what are, in today‘s society, frighteningly perilous encounters.
Even where the interiors of vehicles are fully visible, “roadside encounters between police and suspects are especially hazardous,” Long, 463 U.S. at 1049, with as many as “30% of police shootings occur[ing] when a police officer approache[s] a suspect seated in an automobile,” Mimms, 434 U.S. at 110; see also Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S. 143, 148 n.3 (1972). In fact, as the Court noted recently in Wilson, in 1994 alone, 5,762 assaults on police officers occurred during the course of traffic pursuits or stоps. See Wilson, 117 S. Ct. at 885 (citation omitted). Thus, “it [is] `too plain for argument‘” that the governmental interest in officer safety during traffic stops is substantial. Id. (quoting Mimms, 434 U.S. at 110).
When, during already dangerous traffic stops, officers must approach vehicles whose occupants and interiors are blocked from view by tinted windows, the potential harm to which the officers are exposed increases exponentially, to the point, we believe, of unconscionability. Indeed, we can conceive of almost nothing more dangerous to a law enforcement officer in the context of a traffic stop than approaching an automobile whose passenger compartment is entirely hidden from the officer‘s view by darkly tinted windows. As the officer exits his cruiser and proceeds toward the tinted-windowed vehicle, he has no way of knowing whether the vehicle‘s driver is fumbling for his driver‘s license or reaching for a gun; he does not know whether he is about to encounter a single law-abiding citizen or to be ambushed by a car-full of armed assailants. He literally does not even know whether a weapon has been trained on him from the moment the stop was initiated. As one officer put the obvious: “If the suspect has a weapon, I might not see it until he rolls down the window. He may just shoot me through the window.”3 If, as the Court has noted, officers
In contrast to the indisputably substantial government interest in protecting its law enforcement officials from the danger that inheres in the lawful stop of a vehicle with heavily tinted windows, the privacy and liberty interests implicated by the opening of such a vehicle‘s door for the limited purpose of determining whether the vehicle is occupied by one or several persons and whether the vehicle‘s occupants are armed or have access to weapons, are, although not unimportant, comparatively minor, and will always be so.
It is axiomatic, of course, that “[o]ne has a lesser expectation of privacy in a motor vehicle,” in part because “its function is transportation and it seldom serves as one‘s residence or as the repository of personal effects.” United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 12 (1977) (quoting Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U.S. 583, 590 (1974) (plurality opinion)). Because of this, and the fact that vehicular travel is, of necessity, highly regulated, individuals traveling in vehicles “must expect that the State, in enforcing its regulations, will intrude to some extent” on their privacy. New York v. Class, 475 U.S. 106, 113 (1986).
But, apart from the fact that there is a considerably reduced privacy interest in a vehicle‘s interior passenger сompartment as a matter of law, the driver and other occupants of a lawfully stopped vehicle have already had their liberty curtailed. Moreover, because the driver must comply with routine requests for identification and registration, he will be required at some point during the brief detention to expose the interior compartment of his vehicle to view through at least one window, if for no other reason than to interact with the officer. Of course, when the driver lowers the window, then much if not all of the car‘s interior will be visible to the officer. The additional interference with the occupants’ privacy interests affected by the opening of one of the vehicle‘s doors would seem minimal when measured against the enormous danger law enforcement officers face when they approach a vehicle with heavily tinted windows. Such an intrusion would seem considerably less than the intrusions affected by ordering the driver and passengеrs to exit the vehicle and to proceed to the shoulder of the road, which were held in Mimms and Wilson, respectively, to be “de minimis” in comparison to the states’ interests in protecting their law enforcement personnel under circumstances far less inherently dangerous than those existing when the
2.
Even if there were reasonable altеrnatives to allowing officers to open the door of a vehicle with heavily tinted windows in order to ascertain whether the driver is armed and whether there are other occupants in the vehicle, we would hesitate to impose them on the law enforcement community as a matter of constitutional law. As the Supreme Court has been at pains to observe, during Terry-type stops, officers “must make . . . `quick decision[s] as to how to protect [themselves] and others from possible danger‘” at times when they are “particularly vulnerable,” and thus it has “not required that officers adopt alternate means to ensure their safety in order to avoid the intrusion involved in [such an] encounter.” Long, 463 U.S. at 1052 (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 28); see also id. at 1052 n.16. That is, the Court has scrupulously avoided substituting its judgment for that of law enforcement as to how best to ensure officer safety.
With that said, however, we are at a loss to identify an acceptable alternative to a rule such as that we suggest would be justified. Upon a momеnt‘s reflection, it becomes apparent that neither requiring officers (while in their cruisers or as they proceed toward the stopped vehicle) instead to order occupants to exit the vehicle nor requiring that they order that all of the vehicle‘s doors be opened, represents an acceptable, or even a reasonable, alternative. To require officers to order the vehicle‘s occupants to exit as the officers approach the stopped vehicle exposes the officers to the very danger to which we believe it is unconscionable to subject them, namely, that they might
be fired upon as they approach the vehicle. As the Court observed in Terry, it is by definition “unreasonable to require that police officers take unnecessary risks in the performance of their duties.” 392 U.S. at 23. On the other hand, to insist that officers remain in their vehicles and order the occupants out ignores the fact that, with heavily tinted windows, the officers could never know whether all of the vehicle‘s occupants had exited; and, eventually, the officers would still be required under this alternative to approach a vehicle which, insofar as the officers could know, still held passengers who might be armed and dangerous. Ordering that the vehicle‘s doors be opened, of course, allows the vehicle‘s occupants legitimately to move about the vehicle in ways that would enable them to access available weapons, which represents a separate danger unto itself.
Therefore, in the end, we believe, it will be impractical, if not impossible, for law enforcement officers to neutralize the dangers to which they are exposed by virtue of heavily tinted windows. There simply do not appear to be any alternatives to the bright-line rule we suggest, which would infringe less on the residual privacy interests that drivers and passengers retain in the interior compartment of a lawfully stopped vehicle, yet still allow law enforcement officers to take that control of the situation that enables them to minimize the risk of harm to themselves and to the vehicle‘s occupants. Cf. Wilson, 65 U.S.L.W. at 4126 (“The risk of harm to both the police and the occupants is minimized if the officers routinely exercise unquestioned command of the situation.” (quoting Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692, 703 (1981))). A bright-line rule that officers could always pursue the course of opening the door of a tinted-windowed vehicle when, in their informed judgment, such an act appears necessary to protect their safety, would not render the stops of such vehicles risk-free, but it would at least reduce to an extent the enormous danger to which law enforcement authorities are exposed as a consequence of the advent of tinted windows.
Even absent a Mimms/Wilson-type per se rule that officers may, in the circumstances we have described, open a vehicle‘s door to determine the number of occupants within and whether any of those occupants are armed or have access to weapons, however, Officer Mackel‘s opening of Stanfield‘s passenger door was fully authorized under the principles, if not by the direct holdings, of Terry, Long and Buie. Officer Mackel‘s belief that he was potentially in danger as he approached Stanfield‘s Pathfinder was imminently reasonable; it would be folly to suggest otherwise. Under Terry, Long and Buie, therefore, it is clear that Officer Mackel could have conducted a protective search of the entire interior compartment of Stanfield‘s vehicle to ensure his safety and that of his partners. It follows a fortiori that Officer Mackel‘s much more limited search of merely opening the Pathfinder‘s door was reasonable under the
As our previous discussion suggests, we are convinced that the presence of windows so tinted that the vehicle‘s interior compartment is not visible is, in itself, a circumstance that would сause an officer reasonably to believe that his safety might be in danger -- as the district court held. When the fact of the tinted windows on Stanfield‘s Pathfinder is considered together with the other circumstances informing Officer Mackel‘s judgment as he approached Stanfield‘s vehicle on the morning of April 29, 1996, we are satisfied that no reasonable officer would have failed to appreciate the potential danger confronting Officer Mackel and his partners.
First, Stanfield was, at the time of the stop, in violation of the state‘s traffic laws, having parked his Pathfinder in the middle of a two-way street, which was not passable by two cars simultaneously. See Stanfield, 906 F. Supp. at 301. Second, Stanfield‘s vehicle was stopped in the early morning in a relatively deserted area of town. See id.; J.A. at 128. Third, Stanfield‘s vehicle was stopped in an area of Baltimore known for its open narcotics trafficking and high crime rate. See Stanfield, 906 F. Supp. at 301; J.A. at 53. As we have often noted, where there are drugs, thеre are almost always guns. And, as the Supreme Court has recognized, in a high crime area, “the possibility that any given individual is armed is significant.” Buie, 494 U.S. at 334 n.2. Fourth, Stanfield was driving a vehicle which, according to the officers’ testimony and the district court‘s factual finding, “is of the class of four wheel drive vehicles favored by drug dealers,” and is also “the preferred target of car thieves.” Stanfield, 906 F. Supp. at 301 & n.3; J.A. at 163-64. Fifth, as the district court found, the officers did not know and could not determine, because of the tinting on the windows, “whether Stanfield was alone or whether any weapon was within arms reach of the defendant.” See Stanfield, 906 F. Supp. at 303. And, sixth, as the district court found, Stanfield had been seen by the officers conversing with William Staten, a known drug dealer, immediately prior to his encounter with Officers Mackel, Buie and Hamel. Id. at 301, 304 n.10; J.A. at 151-52, 237 (testimony of Officer Mackel); J.A. at 19 (Government‘s Memorandum of Law in Response to Defendant‘s Motion to Suppress Evidence).5 Only the most fool- (Text continued on page 16)
hardy
There was more reason for Officer Mackel to believe that his safety might be in danger than there was in Long for Deputies Howell and Lewis to believe that their safety might be in danger. The Supreme Court there held that Howell and Lewis were “clearly justified” in their conclusion that Long might pose a danger to them were he allowed to reenter his vehicle because (1) “[t]he hour was late and the area rural,” (2) Long had been speeding and had swerved into a ditch, (3) Long had appeared to be under the influence of an intoxicant, and (4) the officers had seen a hunting knife on the floorboard of Long‘s car.6 463 U.S. at 1050. The Court readily reached this conclusion notwithstanding that the officers had already completed their detention of the suspect without incident; they knew that there were no other occupants in Long‘s vehicle; they also knew that there was no one else in the vicinity who could pose an immediate threat to their safety;
they knew that Long did not have a weapon on his person; they had determined that, although Long was not impaired sufficiently that he could not drive, he was unlikely to initiate an assault on the officers; and they had reason to believe that Long wished to leave the scene without further involvement with the authorities.
In contrast, here, Officers Mackel, Buie and Hamel had just initiated their encounter with Stanfield, who was driving a vehicle not uncommonly associated with drug activity; they were in a high crime area known for its open drug trafficking; they had, only moments earlier, seen Stanfield talking with a known drug dealer; they did not know whether Stanfield was alone or accompanied by others; they were unable, because of the tinting of the windows, to determine whether Stanfield, or any other occupants of the vehicle, were presently armed or had ready access to weapons; and they had no reason to think Stanfield might be incapacitated in such a way as actually to reduce any threat he might posе to them.
If there was less reason for Officer Mackel to believe that he might be in danger than
Although the Court in Buie did not itself resolve the ultimate issue of whether the protective sweep undertaken by the officers was justified under the Terry and Long standard, which the Court there held was applicable to the officers’ sweep of Buie‘s hоme, the Court specifically analogized law enforcement‘s interest “in taking steps to assure themselves that the house in which a suspect is being, or has just been, arrested is not harboring other persons who are dangerous and who could unexpectedly launch an attack,” to the “immediate interest of the police officers [in Terry and Long] in taking steps to assure themselves that the persons with whom they were dealing were not armed with, or able to gain immediate control of, a weapon that could unexpectedly and fatally be used against them.” Buie, 494 U.S. at 333. The Court noted that an in-home arrest, unlike the typical encounter on the street, “puts the officer at the disadvantage of being on his adversary‘s `turf[,]’ [and that] [a]n ambush in a confined setting of unknown configuration is more to be feared than it is in open, more familiar surroundings.” Id. Even so, however, the Court was hesitant to characterize either the risk of danger during an in-home arrest or the risk of danger in an “on-the-street оr roadside investigatory encounter” as the greater. Id. Based upon these overarching observations concerning the relative risks associated with in-home arrests and traffic stops, and with due regard to the relevant specifics, we are even unprepared to say that the risk of danger to Officers Mackel, Buie, and Hamel was less pronounced than was the risk to the officers in Buie.
From the information elicited at the suppression hearing, we do not know whether Allen [Buie‘s accomplice] had been arrested or was still at large. The testimony at the hearing does not give any indication that Allen was seen entering or leaving Buie‘s home during the three day surveillance period. In fact, there was no testimony that placed Allen at Buie‘s home at any time prior to Buie‘s arrest. Neither is there information as to what type of relationship Buie and Allen had; that is, we do not know whether they were longtime friends who spent a great deal of time together or whether the only time they were ever together was the night of the alleged robbery.
The inconclusive surveillance . . . does not help the State. It surely does not permit the inference that the police thought Allen was at Buie‘s hоuse, for if they had believed that they would have brought along his arrest warrant as well as Buie‘s.
Buie v. Maryland, 580 A.2d 167, 173-74 (Md. 1990) (Adkins, J., dissenting). Here, of course, while Officers Mackel, Buie, and Hamel likewise had no specific reason to believe that there were other passengers in the Pathfinder, they did know that there was someone in the vehicle (Stanfield) who, for the reasons earlier recited, potentially might be dangerous.
In contrast to the substantial state interest in having the investigatory detention necessitated by Stanfield‘s traffic infraction conclude without harm to its law enforcement officials, the liberty and privacy interests which Stanfield attempts to protect are, for the reasons previously discussed, notably insubstantial. Additionally, because, even according to Stanfield, the driver‘s side window was down when the officers approached the Pathfinder, the interior of Stanfield‘s car, as well as contents lying exposed on the back seat, were fully open to the view of the offiсers and passersby.7 Even had all of the Pathfinder‘s windows been raised, the undisputed evidence in the record before us is that Stanfield‘s tinted windows would not have
Assuming that Stanfield did have some residual privacy interest in the interior compartment of his car, the additional intrusion on that interest that resulted from the mere opening of the passenger door was inconsequential. There is, of course, no comparison between the “severe,” “surely . . . annoying, frightening, and perhaps humiliating” pat-down of the person authorized by the Court in Terry, 392 U.S. at 24-25, and the incremental additional intrusion on Stanfield‘s privacy interests affected by the mere opening of his passenger door. Similarly, the protective sweep of the home authorized by the Court in Buie, pursuant to which the police were authorized to search closets, showers, attics, studies, basements, and underneath beds, was much more offensive to privacy interests than was the search here. And, obviously, the opening of the car door and perusal of the car‘s interior from the outside interfered less with Stanfield‘s privacy interest than would have a complete search of the vehicle‘s interior permitted under Long, which could have included visual inspection of any area in which a weapon might have been secreted.
We even believe, as explained supra, that the intrusion affected by Officer Mackel‘s mere opening of the passenger door of Stanfield‘s Pathfinder was considerably less than those intrusions authorized as a matter of course by the Court in Mimms and Wilson. The opening of the door of the Pathfinder exposed to view little more of Stanfield‘s body than was already exposed to view through the open driver side window and little more of the interior compartment than was visible through that same window. And, in contrast to the action that may be ordered under Mimms and Wilson, the mere opening of the door did not require Stanfield (nor would it have required any other occupants of the vehicle) to move at all.
In sum, when the state‘s substantial interest in ensuring that its investigatory detention of Stanfield occurred without incident to its law enforcement agents is weighed in the balance with Stanfield‘s privacy interests implicated by Officer Mackel‘s search, there can be no doubt but that the search was reasonable under the circumstances and appropriately limited in scope. What was said of Officer McFadden‘s actions in Terry is no less true of Officer Mackel‘s actions here:
We cannot say his decision [to open the passenger door to Stanfield‘s Pathfinder in order to determine whether there were other passengers in the vehicle or whether the driver or other had access to weapons] was the product of a volatile or inventive imagination, or was undertaken simply as an act of harassment; the record evidences the tempered act of a policeman who in the course of an investigation had to make a quick decision as to how to protect himself and others from possible danger, and took limited steps to do so.
392 U.S. at 28. To hold otherwise than we do today would be “to require that police officers take unnecessary risks in the performance of their duties,” Terry, 392 U.S. at 23, something which, as the Supreme Court has consistently held, the Constitution does not require.8
Because Officer Mackel was engaged in a reasonable protective search when he opened Stanfield‘s passenger door for the limited purpose of determining whether Stanfield was armed and whether there were any other occupants within the vehicle who might pose a danger to him or his partners, and because the cocaine that Stanfield seeks to suppress was seen by Officer Mackel in plain view during the conduct of this reasonable search, the district court‘s denial of Stanfield‘s motion to suppress is affirmed.
AFFIRMED
Notes
J.A. at 152. It is plain from this exchange between defendant‘s own counsel and Officer Mackel that defense counsel himself understood that Officer Mackel had previously had “dealings” with Staten in connection with drug transactions. Stanfield even contended to the district court that, as the officers exited their cruiser, “one of the officers then shouted up to William [Staten] and asked [Staten] whether he had stopped dealing drugs.” See J.A. at 238. It is plain that defense counsel‘s strategy was to develop a case that the officers had relied upon the pretext of Stanfield‘s traffic offense to investigate their “hunch” that, because Stanfield was talking to a known drug dealer, he might be engaged in a drug transаction, and, in fact, this was the very argument defendant advanced before the district court, see J.A. at 238 (opinion of district court) (“Stanfield argues that the officers were not attracted to him because of any traffic violation but because they were investigating drug trafficking.“). Indeed, although Stanfield (for obvious reasons) does not mention the officers’ previous dealings with Staten in his submissions to this court, one of Stanfield‘s two assignments of error from the district court‘s denial of his suppression motion was that the officers acted only on this hunch. See Appellant‘s Br. at 2-9. It is evident, therefore, that the district court‘s finding that Stanfield was talking with a man known by the officers to be a drug dealer is unassailable. The Assistant United States Attorney himself, albeit in direct contradiction of his own representations before us, even represented to the district court that “[a]n officer recognized th[e] individual [to whom Stanfield was talking] as William Staten, an individual about whom [the officer] had received information indicating Staten‘s involvement in the distribution of controlled substances.” See Government‘s Memorandum of Law in Response to Defendant‘s Motion to Suppress Evidence, J.A. at 18, 19.Q: What really happened here was that you were on routine patrol, in your bullet proof vests, and you saw Mr. Stanfield talking to someone who you knew, isn‘t that correct?
A: Once I pulled into the block, that is correct. I recognized who it was.
. . .
Q: . . . Now, when you saw Mr. Stanfield talking to someone, isn‘t it true that that is why you really stopped your vehicle and got out of the car and started investigating Mr. Stanfield?
A: No.
Q: Isn‘t it true that that person [Staten] you had known through previous, I guess through some previous dealings, that he might be or was a law breaker?
A: Yes, I had dealings with Mr. Staten before.
Q: And the real reason you got out of the car, all three of you, had nothing to do with being double parked, but you wanted to see what was up, isn‘t that correct?
A: No, that is not true.
Q: And you really, all you really had was a hunch and you just wanted to go in and see what was up?