Stanley v. State

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The defendant, Stanley, was convicted of unlawful possession and control of a narcotic drug, a misdemeanor, tie contends that heroin, which was taken from him after an arrest which he says was unlawful, was wrongfully admitted at his trial. His reliance is on the combination of the holding of the Supreme Court in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 , 6 L. Ed. 2d 1081 , that the proscription of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States against the use of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure is made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment, and the subsequent decision of this Court in Belton v. State, 228 Md. 17. Belton held that as a result of Mapp, evidence illegally seized is no longer admissible in Maryland courts in narcotics prosecutions despite the provisions of Code (1957), Art. 27, Sec. 299, which except such prosecutions from the prohibitions of the Bouse Act (Code (1957), Art. 35, Sec. 5) in misdemeanor cases.

On September 22, 1961, at about 3:45 a. m., the defendant and two other men were stopped by two uniformed Baltimore City police officers while riding in a 1960 Oldsmobile, bearing Maryland license number AL29-32. The officers got out of the police car, drew their pistols, placed the defendant and the ¹⁹⁰ others under arrest, told them to put their hands on the dashboard, and held them in that position until their sergeant arrived. Then, the defendant and the other occupants were ordered out of the car and were subjected to a search, in the course of which the arresting officers discovered in the right jacket pocket of the defendant a small package wrapped in green paper, the contents of which were later identified as heroin. In a subsequent search at police headquarters, a similar package, the contents of which were also later identified as heroin, was found in the defendant’s sock.

Officer Snead, one of the arresting officers, testified that the reason he stopped the vehicle the defendant was driving was that he had received a teletype message on his patrol car radio to stop a vehicle matching the description of the Oldsmobile, with Maryland tags number AL29-32, in which were two colored occupants who were suspected of illegally possessing narcotics, that he had not been informed of and did not know the defendant’s name or his description, and that at no time did he see the defendant violate any law. The instruction to stop the vehicle which the defendant was driving, on which the arresting officers relied in making their arrest, was placed on teletype at approximately 12:30 a. m. September 22, by the Maryland State Police at the request of one Greenfeld, a federal agent who was acting upon information which had been relayed to him in Baltimore by Federal narcotics agents in New York who had had the defendant under surveillance as a result of information passed on to them by a special employee (an informant). The New York agents both testified that they had not observed the defendant violate any law nor had their special employee, who merely had heard that the defendant had narcotics in his possession which he was taking back to Baltimore.

Agent Greenfeld testified that based on the information he had received from New York, his evaluation thereof, and a conversation with Captain Carroll of the Baltimore Police Narcotics Squad as to the local narcotics activities of the defendant, he “believed” that the defendant was bringing narcotics to Baltimore. At the outset of the trial it was stipulated that the arresting officers had neither a search warrant nor.an arrest warrant. ¹⁹¹ There has been no contention, either at the trial or on appeal, that the defendant consented to the search of his person when he was arrested, or at any time thereafter. The State relies on the primary premise that the heroin was properly admitted because it was obtained by means of a search and seizure incident to a lawful arrest, and on an alternative premise that even if the arrest is found to be unlawful and the subsequent search illegal, the search was nevertheless not an “unreasonable” one. The legality of the arrest and, therefore, of the reasonableness of the search and seizure incident to the arrest, turns on the law of the State in which the arrest was made, absent a controlling federal statute.

United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 589 , 92 L. Ed. 210 ; Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 15-16 , 92 L. Ed. 436 ; United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U. S. 56, 60 , 94 L. Ed. 653 . The Supreme Court has said that if the arrest was unlawful nothing that happens thereafter can justify a search as its incident. Rios v. United States, 364 U. S. 253, 262-263 , 4 L. Ed. 2d 1688 . See also Louisiana v. Walker, 206 F. Supp. 544 , and the following cases in State Courts all decided after Mapp: People v. Moore (N. Y.), 183 N. E. 2d 225 ; People v.