Commonwealth v. Arias (Lawyers Weekly No. 11-142-17)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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 16-P-362 Appeals Court COMMONWEALTH vs. JOSE L. ARIAS. No. 16-P-362. Essex. January 13, 2017. – November 9, 2017. Present: Green, Trainor, Meade, Hanlon, & Desmond, JJ.[1] Constitutional Law, Search and seizure, Probable cause. Search and Seizure, Probable cause, Exigent circumstances, Emergency, Multiple occupancy building, Protective sweep, Plain view. Probable Cause. Practice, Criminal, Motion to suppress, Interlocutory appeal, Appeal by Commonwealth. Evidence, Informer. Witness, Police informer. Controlled Substances. Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court Department on April 14, 2014. A pretrial motion to suppress evidence was heard by Mary-Lou Rup, J. An application for leave to prosecute an interlocutory appeal was allowed by Geraldine S. Hines, J., in the Supreme Judicial Court for the county of Suffolk, and the appeal was reported by her to the Appeals Court. Ronald DeRosa, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. Esther J. Horwich (Stephen J. Wright also present) for the defendant. TRAINOR, J. This case comes to us on the Commonwealth’s interlocutory appeal from a Superior Court judge’s allowance of the defendant, Jose Arias’s, motion to suppress. The Commonwealth argues that the judge erroneously concluded that the warrantless entry into the defendant’s apartment building was not supported by probable cause and exigent circumstances or, in the alternative, by the emergency aid doctrine. For the reasons discussed, we reverse the judge’s order, based on the application of the emergency aid doctrine. Background. We summarize the facts from the judge’s findings, supplemented by the evidence in the record that is uncontroverted and that was implicitly credited by the judge. See Commonwealth v. Isaiah I., 448 Mass. 334, 337 (2007). On the evening of March 5, 2014, the Lawrence police department received a 911 call from a woman who reported that as she was walking down the street, she saw two “Spanish guys” “with a gun.” She stated that she heard one of the men “load the gun” before entering the apartment building at “7 Royal Street.” The woman was “really freaked out” and informed the dispatcher that she lived at “21 Royal Street.” She also noted that she did not want her call to cause her any “problem[s],” considering that “one of the guys [had] looked at [her].” The woman gave a description of the men to the 911 […]