Commonwealth v. Vick (Lawyers Weekly No. 11-161-16)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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 14-P-1150 Appeals Court COMMONWEALTH vs. TYRONE VICK. No. 14-P-1150. Suffolk. September 7, 2016. – November 8, 2016. Present: Kafker, C.J., Milkey, & Blake, JJ. Controlled Substances. Practice, Criminal, Motion to suppress. Constitutional Law, Investigatory stop, Reasonable suspicion, Probable cause, Search and seizure. Search and Seizure, Reasonable suspicion, Probable cause, Body examination. Probable Cause. Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court Department on June 7, 2007. A pretrial motion to suppress evidence was heard by Charles J. Hely, J., and the cases were tried before Judith Fabricant, J. Genevieve K. Henrique for the defendant. Nicholas Brandt, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. KAFKER, C.J. The defendant, Tyrone Vick, was convicted of possession of a class B substance, see G. L. c. 94C, § 34, following a jury trial. He appeals, arguing that the motion judge erred in denying the defendant’s motion to suppress evidence seized as the result of a stop, a search at the scene, and a search at the police station.[1] The search at the police station involved the use of force to pull down the defendant’s pants and to remove a plastic bag containing drugs (which an officer had felt during the search at the scene) protruding from his buttocks. On appeal, the defendant claims that (1) the motion judge erred by failing to resolve conflicting testimony regarding material facts;[2] (2) the search at the police station constituted a manual body cavity search not supported by a warrant issued by a judge, as required by Rodriques v. Furtado, 410 Mass. 878, 888 (1991); and (3) the police station search, even if characterized as a strip or visual body cavity search, was unreasonably conducted, particularly because it was performed in violation of a Boston police department policy requiring a warrant for the use of force to effectuate such a search. We affirm. Background. “We summarize the facts found by the motion judge following the evidentiary hearing, supplemented where necessary with undisputed testimony that was implicitly credited by the [motion] judge.” Commonwealth v. Oliveira, 474 Mass. 10, 11 (2016). On May 9, 2007, at approximately 6:00 P.M., Boston police Officers Peter Cazeau and Linda Stanford, both in uniform, were on patrol in a marked cruiser near the intersection of Stuart and Tremont Streets, in an area of […]