A D.C. police officer was justified in stopping and searching a robbery suspect despite a vague lookout for the robbers as only “black males in dark clothing,” the District’s highest court has ruled. The D.C. Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of Casey Hampleton, who was found guilty in November 2006 of robbing three people at gunpoint near a Washington nightclub that May.
Hampleton had appealed, arguing that the lookout could have applied to “large numbers of people” and therefore could not have been a reasonable basis for a police stop. That would have meant identifications made by officers summoned to the scene of the stop and some physical evidence were “the fruit of an illegal seizure,” he argued.
But the appeals court recently ruled that the “totality of the circumstances” meant Officer Lennox Antoine was justified when he stopped Hampleton on the 3700 block of North Capitol Street.
An armed robbery had been reported on the 2000 block of Fairview Avenue NE about half an hour earlier, and the victims reported that at least five suspects fled in a Jeep Liberty. Police chased the Jeep until it crashed into a tree near Second and Taylor Streets NE, and the suspects fled on foot near Archbishop Carroll High School.
Antoine spotted Hampleton on North Capitol Street, about a quarter mile away, and stopped him.
The appeals court noted that the lookout description was “admittedly vague” but said “Mr. Hampleton was the only one in the immediate area who fit the lookout description” and was “the only person in the area that Officer Antoine saw at all.”
Officers who saw the suspects flee from the vehicle went to the scene and identified Hampleton as one of those men. He was arrested, and the victims also identified him.
“Given … the closeness in time and areas of the bailout and the stop and the clear indication that at least one of the robbers had fled across the high school grounds toward North Capitol Street, we agree with the trial court’s ruling” in denying Hampleton’s motion to suppress those identifications, the appeals court wrote.
