Court Upholds Gun Conviction, Police Stop

D.C. Officers Lacked Just Cause, Appellant Tells Federal Judges

One March night in 2004, D.C. police stopped Melvin Goddard and three friends outside a Columbia Heights gas station while hunting for a fleeing car thief. All four fit the police's vague description of the suspect: a casually dressed black man.

Goddard did not take the car, but he had a gun in his waistband, which he quickly surrendered to police as they approached, according to court records. He was convicted of gun possession and appealed, arguing that he had been illegally stopped without just cause.

Yesterday, two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit helped decide Goddard's case -- upholding the legality of the police stop and his conviction on the gun charge. But the judges -- one a black conservative and the other a white liberal -- debated a burning question they said the police stop had raised: Do police officers rely on a different, and lower, standard for suspecting criminal behavior in a high-crime minority neighborhood?

The case centered on whether police had reasonable suspicion that Goddard and his friends might be involved in criminal activity when the four officers jumped out of their unmarked, police-issued Crown Victoria at the gas station on Sherman Avenue and stopped them. Based on a landmark 1968 court ruling, law enforcement officers cannot stop someone without a reasonable suspicion.

In the panel's 2 to 1 decision, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who is black and a Bush appointee, found the standards used to stop Goddard "very troubling" and argued that allowing such a low level of suspicion would turn all black men in bad neighborhoods into suspects and set up an unequal standard.

"What we are now tempted to enforce is . . . the rule that in a high-crime neighborhood, being young, male and black creates reasonable, articulable suspicion," wrote Rogers Brown. "For as we all know, courts would not approve the search of four men in business attire, conversing peaceably in front of a Starbucks, if the only basis for the search was a 'lookout' broadcast specifying a white man, medium height and build, wearing a business suit."

Judge David S. Tatel, who is white, a leading liberal on the court and a Clinton appointee, said that he agreed with Brown's assessment of the fairness of such stops but that legal precedents tied his and Brown's hands. He said precedents from their court -- one of the most conservative in the country -- made siding with Goddard and against the police stop impossible.

"I share many of the dissent's concerns about how courts have applied [the search law] in high-crime, minority communities, and would welcome an opportunity to explore those concerns in depth," Tatel wrote. "This case, however, cannot provide that opportunity because the problems so well articulated by the dissent flow directly from a series of Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit decisions that bind this panel . . . and determine the outcome of the issues before us."

Brown asked about the larger issue of fairness required by the Constitution.

"By the district court's logic, police would have been able to stop virtually every casually dressed black man within a sixteen-block radius of the crime," she wrote of Goddard's conviction on the gun charge.

She argued that Goddard's conviction had to be overturned because the police learned about his gun only with an illegal stop.

"Is that too much to ask?" she wrote. "It is what the constitution requires; it is just enough."