Commonwealth v. Ramirez (Lawyers Weekly No. 11-017-18)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports.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 16-P-1580 Appeals Court COMMONWEALTH vs. WILLIAM J. RAMIREZ. No. 16-P-1580. Essex. October 6, 2017. – February 9, 2018. Present: Wolohojian, Maldonado, & Wendlandt, JJ. Firearms. Search and Seizure, Protective frisk, Threshold police inquiry, Reasonable suspicion, Arrest. Constitutional Law, Search and seizure, Investigatory stop, Stop and frisk, Reasonable suspicion, Arrest. Threshold Police Inquiry. Arrest. Practice, Criminal, Motion to suppress. Complaints received and sworn to in the Haverhill Division of the District Court Department on April 2 and 7, 2015. A pretrial motion to suppress evidence was heard by Patricia A. Dowling, J., and the case was heard by Stephen S. Albany, J. Suzanne Lynn Renaud for the defendant. Philip A. Mallard, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. MALDONADO, J. After a bench trial, the defendant was convicted of carrying a loaded firearm without a license and defacing a firearm serial number.[1] The defendant appeals only from the denial of his motion to suppress the firearm. The issue before us is whether a police officer was justified in stopping the defendant, who was walking with a man for whom the officer had an active arrest warrant involving the use of a firearm in the commission of a violent felony. Concluding that under these narrow circumstances police and public safety concerns outweighed the minimal intrusion on the defendant’s liberty for the time it took for police to take control of the scene and effectuate the other individual’s arrest, we affirm. Background. The judge made the following factual findings. In the afternoon of March 25, 2015, shots were fired down Winter Street in Haverhill and struck and wounded a passerby. Haverhill police officers received reports that a man named Joshua Perez had fired the shots, and they obtained a warrant for his arrest.[2] A few days later, on April 1, at approximately 5 P.M., local, State, and Federal law enforcement officers converged on Brook Street and Hilldale Avenue in Haverhill believing that Perez was in that area. Detective Glen Fogarty, who was alone in an unmarked police cruiser, heard a radio transmission that indicated that Perez was walking toward his position. Fogarty then saw Perez, who was walking down the street with another man — later identified as the defendant, William Ramirez. Fogarty drove his cruiser to the side of […]