Oops, the cops did it again: The D.C. Court of Appeals has thrown out yet another gun seizure due to improper search tactics by Metropolitan Police Department officers.
In what is becoming a surprisingly frequent development, three judges on the Court of Appeals moved Thursday to vacate the 2016 convictions of a Maryland man who was found by a jury to have shot a rideshare driver during an armed carjacking in Southeast. This time, the appeals court found that MPD officers illegally stopped Gene James as he left an apartment building not far from the scene of the carjacking. Then, officers used information they learned from James while he was detained to find a semiautomatic rifle that tied him to the crime.
James was originally sentenced to 17 years in prison in 2019 on gun and assault charges related to the incident. But without that rifle to use as evidence, the appellate court threw out James’ conviction and sent the case back to D.C. Superior Court. An MPD spokesperson said the department is aware of the ruling and that it will “continue to work with our partners at the United States Attorney’s Office to ensure that our members are trained appropriately to ensure compliance.” A USAO spokesperson declined to comment, including whether the office will continue to pursue charges against James.
This is the third case in as many months in which MPD’s unconstitutional searches have led to firearms evidence failing scrutiny from the court of appeals. Prosecutors have accused the court of being out of step with national standards for search and seizure cases, but this latest ruling lends more credence to the argument Loose Lips has made for months now: Like it or not, these judges aren’t changing their minds. Why keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. LL knows well that the department has little interest or incentive to change its tactics. Why do the hard work of making reforms when you can just blame “soft-on-crime” policies for letting people out of jail instead? Besides, many defendants won’t fight such charges for eight years, as James has, particularly on a non-homicide case. (Two other men, Jamiek Bassil and Travonn Davis, pleaded guilty to armed robbery and firearms charges related to this incident, an extremely common occurrence in these kinds of cases.)
A D.C. Superior Court judge first ruled that police illegally stopped James back in 2018. According to court documents, cops received a call about a shooting during a carjacking near 16th and W streets SE in Anacostia on Nov. 19, 2016. An Uber driver claimed that three men dressed in black jumped out of a car and demanded his vehicle and that one of the men pointed an assault rifle at him. The driver struggled with the man holding the rifle and it fired multiple times, striking the driver in the leg. The three men got into the car and drove off. Police later found it abandoned on the 1800 block of Morris Road SE, according to the appeals court ruling, and called on police dogs to track the suspects.
Haas, a dog in the K-9 unit, led several officers to some nearby apartment buildings on Gainesville Street SE, but lost the scent shortly afterward. That was when they spotted James leaving one of the buildings while “putting on clothes,” the ruling said. He had “shoulder-length dreads,” matching the description provided by the Uber driver of one of his assailants, so the police stopped and arrested James.
After detaining him, the cops briefly searched the building and didn’t find anything of note. But a second sweep of the building’s laundry room revealed a rifle stashed in a blue bag behind some washing machines.
Ahead of trial, Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman ruled that the cops didn’t have any reasonable basis to stop James in the first place and tossed out some of the evidence that they discovered during that search. But Edelman believed the officers would’ve found the rifle in the laundry room independent of that illegal stop, so he let prosecutors use the gun as evidence against James. Police also found shell casings matching such a rifle at the scene of the carjacking and found James’ DNA on the firearm. The first jury to hear the case deadlocked on some of the charges, but a second trial resulted in convictions on all counts.
The court of appeals, however, ruled that Edelman never should have allowed the rifle to be used as evidence. The judges felt that it wasn’t an inevitability that cops would have discovered the gun without stopping James, since they missed it the first time. And they point to the officers’ interactions with James as a key indication that they only searched the laundry room a second time because of what he told them during that stop.
Specifically, body-worn camera footage shows officers expressing skepticism about James’ explanation for why he was at the apartment building, with one remarking that his “story’s changing, changing, changing.” As the officers discussed whether to search the buildings again, another can be heard justifying the decision by saying “you saw the way he started acting.”
“In the government’s view, the information known to officers prior to the stop would have led them to search the laundry room separate and apart from Mr. James’s detention,” the judges wrote. “But Sergeant [Jeffrey] Kopp did look all around the laundry room and did not find a gun. It was Officer [Steven] Roselle’s second search—conducted in spite of his knowledge that the building had already been searched and brought on by his suspicion of Mr. James after speaking with him—that ultimately led to the rifle.”
Without the rifle, there’s hardly anything tying James to the incident. (The Uber driver could not identify him during the trials as the attacker.) So what looked like an otherwise open-and-shut case against James has been completely undone by MPD’s mistakes.
LL knows that, no matter how many times this sort of thing happens, MPD’s defenders will find ways to excuse this conduct. Plenty of people are willing to throw the Fourth Amendment out the window if it means the cops can nab anyone they think might have committed a carjacking or carried an illegal gun.