TRENTON — In a decision criticized by prosecutors and praised by public defenders, the state Supreme Court today stressed that police have limits when frisking suspects without a warrant. The court said a police officer overstepped his authority for lifting a T-shirt while searching a suspect in Plainfield. Officer Jeffrey Plum, responding to an anonymous tip reporting a man...
Two justices, Barry Albin (shown above) and Roberto Rivera-Soto, dissented from the majority ruling, saying that officer Jeffrey Plum acted appropriately in a 2003 search of a suspected gang associate.TRENTON — In a decision criticized by prosecutors and praised by public defenders, the state Supreme Court today stressed that police have limits when frisking suspects without a warrant.
The court said a police officer overstepped his authority for lifting a T-shirt while searching a suspect in Plainfield.
Officer Jeffrey Plum, responding to an anonymous tip reporting a man with a handgun, spotted Tysen Privott, a suspected gang associate who roughly matched the tipster’s description. Plum searched Privott, pulling up his long T-shirt to check for a gun in his waistband. He found a bag of crack cocaine.
The court said Plum was allowed to frisk Privott but should not have lifted his shirt, saying police should use "the least intrusive means reasonably available to verify or dispel the officer’s suspicion in a short period of time." The situation called for a "pat-down search," not something "akin to a generalized cursory search" which is prohibited, the court said in an opinion written by former justice John Wallace.
Prosecutors said the ruling will place officers in jeopardy by discouraging them from thoroughly searching suspects.
"To the extent that today’s decision makes an officer hesitate in his effort to deal with the immediate danger of a firearm, there is no place for such constitutional parsing when an officer’s safety is on the line," said Paul Loriquet, spokesman for the attorney general.
Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow, whose office pursued charges against Privott after the 2003 search, agreed.
"The practical approach for the safety of officers, many times, is better than the intellectual one," he said.
Prosecutors’ concerns echoed the dissenting opinion written by Justice Barry Albin and joined by Justice Roberto Rivera-Soto.
"I cannot conclude that the officer — making a split-second decision in a fast-moving and dangerous encounter — exceeded the scope of a reasonable search by lifting defendant’s shirt," Albin wrote. "It cannot be that the law imposes a duty on a police officer to investigate a man with a gun and, at the same time, the constitution forbids him from taking reasonable measures to protect his life."
The public defender’s office, however, said it is "gratified that the Supreme Court has insisted that the least intrusive means necessary is used to ensure a police officer’s safety."
Attorney Alan Zegas, who reviews criminal law opinions for the New Jersey Law Journal, said police without warrants can search suspects only enough to prove or disprove their original suspicions. "That’s really as far as they can go," he said.
Privott was indicted on drug charges and sentenced to prison after the trial court refused to throw out evidence from Plum’s search. He is currently at a Newark halfway house. Appellate judges overturned the conviction last year, saying police needed to corroborate the anonymous tip before searching Privott.
Although the Supreme Court agreed to throw out the conviction, it said only the scope of Plum’s search was excessive, not the search itself.