Commonwealth v. Buckley (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-029-18)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports. If you find a typographical error or other formal error, please notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Judicial Court, John Adams Courthouse, 1 Pemberton Square, Suite 2500, Boston, MA, 02108-1750; (617) 557-1030; SJCReporter@sjc.state.ma.us SJC-12344 COMMONWEALTH vs. ROGELIO R. BUCKLEY. Plymouth. October 5, 2017. – February 14, 2018. Present: Gants, C.J., Lenk, Gaziano, Lowy, Budd, Cypher, & Kafker, JJ. Controlled Substances. Constitutional Law, Search and seizure, Reasonable suspicion, Investigatory stop. Search and Seizure, Threshold police inquiry, Reasonable suspicion, Consent, Motor vehicle. Threshold Police Inquiry. Practice, Criminal, Motion to suppress. Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court Department on April 19, 2013. A pretrial motion to suppress evidence was heard by Cornelius J. Moriarty, II, J., and the cases were tried before Richard J. Chin, J. The Supreme Judicial Court granted an application for direct appellate review. Matthew Malm for the defendant. Mary E. Lee, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. The following submitted briefs for amici curiae: Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, of New York, Oren M. Sellstrom, & Oren N. Nimni for Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice & others. Rebecca Kiley, Committee for Public Counsel Services, & Derege B. Demissie for Committee for Public Counsel Services & another. Jeff Goldman, Vanessa M. Brown, Matthew R. Segal, Rahsaan D. Hall, Jessie J. Rossman, & Carlton E. Williams for American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. Daniel F. Conley, District Attorney, & John P. Zanini, Cailin M. Campbell, & David D. McGowan, Assistant District Attorneys, for District Attorney for the Suffolk District. CYPHER, J. In this appeal we are asked to reconsider one tenet of our search and seizure jurisprudence: that a traffic stop constitutes a “reasonable” “seizure” for purposes of art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights where a police officer has observed a traffic violation, notwithstanding the officer’s underlying motive for conducting the stop. See Commonwealth v. Santana, 420 Mass. 205 (1995). For the sound legal and practical reasons discussed below, we decline to depart from that tenet as the general standard governing the validity of traffic stops under art. 14. We affirm the denial of the defendant’s motion to suppress, and we also affirm the judgment of conviction. Facts. We recount the facts found by the motion judge, supplemented by uncontroverted testimony at the motion hearing. Commonwealth v. Cordero, 477 Mass. 237, 238 (2017). On January 25, 2013, Whitman police Detectives Joseph Bombardier and Eric Campbell were conducting surveillance of a three-unit apartment building out of […]