Players: Associate Judges Blackburne-Rigsby and Beckwith, Senior
Judge King. Opinion by Associate Judge Blackburne-Rigsby. Cynthia
Nordone for Mr. Smith. Trial Judge Marisa
Demeo.
Facts: Officer Cartwright
stopped Mr. Smith’s car due to the officer’s mistaken belief that the frame
around Mr. Smith’s license plate violated D.C. law because it obstructed the “Taxation
Without Representation” portion of the license plate. (Under the DCCA’s recent opinion in Whitfield v. United States, 99 A.3d 650,
652 (D.C. 2014), a license plate frame that covers some portion of the plate
but that does not obstruct critical identifying information such as the license
plate number does not violate D.C. traffic regulations.) During the stop, Officer Cartwright learned
that Mr. Smith was driving without a license.
Officers then retrieved marijuana from Mr. Smith and from his car. Police officers obtained an arrest warrant
for Mr. Smith. When they saw Mr. Smith
in the neighborhood about a month later, they arrested him and found additional
marijuana on him.
Issue:
Whether the exclusionary rule
applies to evidence obtained pursuant to a search warrant that is based on
evidence from an illegal stop.
Holding: Yes. The government argued that the Leon good faith exception applies to
this situation, as the police officers reasonably relied on a valid arrest
warrant. The DCCA rejected that
argument, as the exclusionary rule prohibits the introduction of derivative evidence, i.e., evidence that
is acquired as an indirect result of an unlawful search. Here, evidence obtained from the illegal
traffic stop of Mr. Smith was the sole basis for the arrest warrant, and no
evidence demonstrated that the police would have discovered the marijuana on
Mr. Smith’s person at the time of his arrest in the absence of the illegal
traffic stop. Therefore, it should have
been suppressed. NG
No comments:
Post a Comment