Court: Cops had enough info to stop and then arrest a man for a Savin Hill robbery and shooting in 2014

The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled today that Boston police officers had enough details on the suspect in the robbery and shooting of a Dot Ave. convenience-store owner that they had the right to stop a suspect they found four blocks away.

A lower-court judge had ruled police did not have probable cause to detain Jarvis Charley for questioning about the Nov. 11, 2014 robbery and shooting at D & D Convenience, 1002 Dorchester Avenue, because he felt the descriptions and videos used by police to stop him were too vague.

But in its ruling today, the Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled prosecutors can use evidence seized after his arrest, such as numerous, sequentially numbers $20 bills in his backpack.

Although the shooter's face was obscured by a mask, the court said other evidence - including color video taken by a store surveillance camera - coupled with the fact that Charley was sweating profusely on a cool November night when an officer first encountered him - were sufficient for "probable cause" for police to investigate whether Charley was involved.

The fact that he was coming from the direction of a recent robbery, in which a person had been shot, coupled with the resemblance of his appearance to that captured on the surveillance video, suggested the reasonable possibilities that he was the person who had robbed the convenience store and that he might be armed and therefore could pose a risk to the officers.

The justices added other evidence gave officers enough reason to take Charley to the C-11 station for questioning, including the fact that he denied any involvement in the shooting at the store several blocks from where police found him before police had even mentioned anybody had been shot.

A lower-court judge discounted that, saying Charley could have known about the shooting from TV reports, but the appellate court in turn discounted that theory:

There was no direct evidence of any such news broadcasts, much less of any exposure by the defendant to any. The judge based his finding to that effect on testimony [from one of the officers] that he saw reporters from various news outlets begin to arrive at the scene of the robbery soon after he did. From that observation, the judge inferred that reporters would have begun broadcasting reports of the incident on radio and television, and posting reports on their respective Web sites, beginning at around 8:00 P.M. The judge further attributed to Ezekiel [the officer] an awareness of that course of news broadcasts, so that Ezekiel, in the judge's view, should not have considered it suspicious when the defendant disclaimed involvement in a "shooting" in response to Ezekiel's reference to an "incident." To the extent that the judge found, as fact, that Ezekiel knew or should have known that news broadcasts of the incident began around 8:00 P.M., and also knew or should have known that the defendant would have been exposed to those news broadcasts by the time Ezekiel began speaking to him at 8:30 P.M., the finding rests on speculation and conjecture rather than evidence, and is clearly erroneous. In any event, even if it is possible that the defendant could before 8:30 P.M. have gained knowledge from news broadcasts that a shooting had occurred at the convenience store, Ezekiel was not compelled to adopt that view of the defendant's otherwise unprompted reference to a shooting in his assessment of its suspicious nature, particularly when the defendant's state of agitation increased when Ezekiel pointed out to the defendant that no one had said anything about a shooting.