An accused person has an option of making a motion to suppress the evidence made available to courts for passing a judgement if they are convinced that such evidence was collected in a manner that violates their freedom from unjustifiable searches and seizure as articulate din Fourth Amendment. This option is so important in the prosecution of a case that if the court grants the motion, then the case gets terminated on technical grounds. It is incumbent among the police officers to not only collect vital evidence but do so in a manner that does not violate the provisions of searches and seizure lest the accused get away with crimes without the judges interrogating the real situations. Should the accused manage to secure the motion, then no one will ever get to determine whether the passenger was indeed in possession of crack cocaine. The section below evaluates whether the motion to supress the evidence presented before courts should be granted. Although the accused have access to the defence option of requesting motion to supress evidence, there are exceptions to this guideline. The law anticipates that without necessarily having a warrant of arrest or search, the police may have reasonable justification while acting in utmost good faith in violating the search and seizure conditions. If this is demonstrated before the judge, then the motion to supress evidence is not granted.
In the first case where the passenger was frisked and found to be in possession of crack cocaine in his clothes, the motion to supress the collected evidence should be denied. On this case, the exceptions of the Fourth Amendments are applicable. The first reason that will inform the decision to deny the appellant the motion is the fact the police were patrolling a high-crime area and had probable cause and reasonable suspicion for possible engagement in unlawful activity. The action of the woman who was leaning was reported to have involved handing over some substance to the passenger. This action was followed by a suspicious walkaway by the woman from the car and sudden shoving movements towards the floor of the car by the passenger. The police proceeded to ask the passenger to check his hands, but he declined temporarily and continued with shove down motions before obeying the instructions. The combination of actions by the passenger and the woman provoked the action by the police who, in the concern of his safety sought for weapons. In the process of looking out for the weapons, the police came upon rocks of crack cocaine, which even though it was never a primary objective of the search, its required enforcement actions.
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Whereas all arrests are guided by the provisions of the Fourth Amendment, the courts should continue to pursue the rule of common law by holding that the police has a right to put a person in custody without necessarily obtaining a warrant of arrest, as long as they have a sufficient probable cause to believe that the arrested person had committed, in the process of committing or was about to commit a crime. In any case, this probable cause is normally a standard requirement for securing an arrest warrant which authorizes the actions of seizure by the police. Notably, there are instances when the reasonable suspicion by the police is provoked by the actions of someone without a probable cause for arresting the person is lacking. In the case of Terry v. Ohio, the court held, in an almost unanimous ruling, that the investigations on the street was allowed by the police officer who is tracking a subject in suspicion of having a weapon (Terry, 1968).
The law anticipates the situations similar to those in the mentioned cases and possible misuse of the Fourth Amendment. Thus, there are six exceptions to the requirement of warrant, two of which are relevant to the cases. The first exception is during a stop and frisk incident. In this exception, the police officers are allowed to stop a suspect as long as they have reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed. The threshold for reasonable suspicion is anything above the basic suspicion but not to the level of probable cause. From this exception, the police are allowed to frisk the suspect if he is convinced that he or she may be carrying weapons. This was the argument during the judgment in Terry v. Ohio (Terry, 1968). The other exception that is relevant to the two scenarios relates to the search of automobiles. This exception appreciates that the vehicles are highly mobile and a warrant is not necessary to search them if there is probable cause by the police that it has instrumentalities, evidence, and fruits of crime or contrabands. Despite being referred to the exception of vehicle, it is equally applicable to other mobile means of transport such as boats and motorbikes. Nonetheless, the search should be done to obtain the evidence of the nature that was suspected as held in Carroll v. United States (Carroll, 1925). In the case of the passenger, the police suspected that there might have been some unlawful items in the custody of the passenger as lead by shoving and sudden walking away by the woman who was leaning on the car and from search the rocks of crack cocaine were obtained.
In the second case where the police officer searched the vehicle occupied by two individuals, the motion to supress us of obtained evidence should be granted. In this case, the police made a huge assumption that because the car was parked in a crime area, it was enough reason to assign probable cause and initiate search and seizure operation. The use of a spotlight during darkness as it was the situation in this case is not prohibited by the law and does not in any way violate the Fourth Amendment. As observed in Texas v. Brown , where the court held that the Fourth Amendment defence cannot be triggered since the use of artificial light was in a darkened area (Texas, 1983). However, the two circumstances relied on by the police in initiating the search were not reasonable enough and observed in State of Connecticut v. Pablo E. Santos (State of Connecticut, 2004) . The facts that the car was parked in a crime area and that the passengers seemed to fumble with something on the vehicle’s floorboard are not sufficient reasons for the police to initiate search operation as they did. A similar case was brought before Supreme Court in appeal to the initial trial case of State of Connecticut v. Pablo E. Santos. Initially, the court had denied the defendant the motion to supress use of evidence collected under similar circumstances as this scenario, but had been decline. Upon appealing, Supreme Court held that mere presence of the suspects at the crime area and their smelling of alcohol were not adequate to deny the appellant motion to suppress the seized evidence. Borrowing from this case, the motion should be granted.
References
Carroll v. United States , 267 U. S. 132 (1925)
Del Carmen, R. V. (2010). Terry v. Ohio. Criminal Procedure and the Supreme Court: A
Guide to the Major Decisions on Search and Seizure, Privacy, and Individual Rights , 57.
State of Connecticut v. Pablo E. Santos, 16924 U.S. (2004)
Terry v. Ohio , 392 U.S. 1 (1968)
Texas v. Brown , 460 U.S. 730 (1983)
U.S. CONST. amend, IV§1
