The officer knocked on the window “many times” to wake the defendant. After one or two minutes, the defendant “put up his hand and waved [the officer] away.” The officer then knocked on the door again and asked the defendant to lower the window.
After the defendant lowered the window the officer asked the defendant for his license to verify who he was and to “make sure the car was valid in his name.” According to the officer the defendant was slow to get his license and attempted to give credit cards to the officer. The defendant seemed very confused and his speech was slurred and slow. The officer asked the defendant where he was, where he was going, and where he was coming from. The defendant was unable to answer the questions; any statements the defendant did provide were not appropriate to the questions. The defendant's eyes were bloodshot, but the officer did not smell alcohol on the defendant.
The defendant successfully provided his license to the officer. The officer then asked the defendant for his registration. When the defendant bent over to get his registration from the glove compartment, the officer noticed the handle of a knife tucked inside the waistband of the defendant's jeans. The officer, for “officer safety,” then asked the defendant to step out of the car. After the defendant got out of the car, the officer asked him if he had weapons on him; the defendant responded, “No”
"For safety reasons" the officer placed the defendant in handcuffs and conducted a patfrisk, which yielded a knife. Earlier, while the defendant was getting out of the car, the officer saw a syringe on the seat underneath where the defendant had been sitting and the corner of a baggie containing a brown powdery substance in the car's center console that the officer knew from his training suggested was “drugs.” After the officer saw the baggie, the defendant was placed under arrest.
The defendant challenged the encounter and the Commonwealth responded that the encounter was appropriate under the police “community caretaking function.”
The Appeals Court explained that local police officers are charged with community caretaking functions “totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.” When performing this function, an officer may “stop individuals and inquire about their wellbeing, even if there are no grounds to suspect . . . criminal activity.” The function applies to police activities involving motor vehicles “in which there are objective facts indicating that a person may be in need of medical assistance or some other circumstance exists apart from the investigation of criminal activity that supports police intervention to protect an individual or the public.”
The Appeals Court concluded that the police activity somehow was in inquiry into wellbeing-- as opposed to an impermissible and random investigation into possible criminal activity.
The Appeals Court reasoned, “the defendant was found alone, on a cold, dark January evening, and he appeared to be sleeping while seated in the driver's seat of a car that was running. It took one or two minutes of the officer tapping on the window and then knocking harder on the door before he got the defendant's attention.”
The defendant was asleep and required some time to arouse. Even if these circumstances warranted further inquiry into the defendant's wellbeing, asking for a license to “make sure the car was valid in his name” is not in inquiry into person's wellbeing. The defendant produced his license. The officer then asked for the car registration--something entirely divorced from the defendant's wellbeing. It was only in response to this request that the officer was able to expand his view into the vehicle.
Because the officer's inquiry was unrelated to the defendant's wellbeing, the only reasonable conclusion was that the officer was suspicious of criminal activity and pursued the matter until his hunch was either confirmed or dispelled. Here, an investigation took place in a private space legally occupied by a defendant based upon the offer's conjecture--conjecture ordinarily recognized as insufficient to subject a citizen to search and seizure.
Whatever might have been the appropriate outcome in this case, the court should be able to apply the facts of a case comfortably to the law. Here, because the officer was not inquiring into the defendant's wellbeing, the officer was not engaged in community caretaking and the reader is left with the impression that bounds on police activity are in reality illusory.
