Court tosses gun as evidence because driving your mom's rental car not good enough reason for police to search your car

Suffolk County prosecutors won't be able to use a gun and ammunition as evidence against a man facing gun charges after his arrest at the Heath Street rotary because the Supreme Judicial Court has ruled the car he was driving should never have been searched.

Jamil Campbell was initially detained by a state trooper at the Heath Street rotary for operating without authority after ignoring a stop sign, because his mother had rented the car, with a condition nobody else be allowed to drive it.

But the state's highest court ruled today that the "without authority" section of the state's motor-vehicle laws is meant for larceny cases and that there's no evidence Campbell stole the car - in fact, his mother even told the state trooper she had let her son drive the car when he called her as Campbell sat in the back of the trooper's cruiser.

So without a reason to charge Campbell with an arrestable offense - running a stop sign is good for a ticket, not an arrest - there was no reason for the inventory search of the car in which the trooper found the gun and ammunition, the court ruled.

According to the ruling, Campbell gave the trooper his driver's license and a copy of his mother's rental agreement after he was stopped on Aug. 17, 2013.

The trooper - patrolling Heath Street due to gun violence in the area - had Campbell sit in the back of his cruiser while he conducted an "inventory" search of Campbell's car. He found the gun in the center console, at which point he told Campbell he was now under arrest. He found ammunition. And then he learned Campbell was wanted for failing to appear for jury duty.

The SJC said Campbell shouldn't have been detained, even if just put in the back of the cruiser, for the operating-without-authority charge. Although the rental agreement said nobody else should drive the car, the court said "authority" of the car at that point was in the hands of Campbell's mother, who not only gave Campbell permission to drive the car, she told the trooper that when he called her as Campbell sat in the cruiser.

The court ruled the "without authority" section of the state's motor-vehicle laws was aimed at protecting the public from people "from harm caused by a user of a motor vehicle who is not readily identifiable." The court added:

Punishing a person who uses a vehicle with the permission of
someone who is in lawful possession of the vehicle, such as a renter, does not advance that purpose, because a user with such permission readily may be identified by the person with explicit authority to use the vehicle.

And, the court continued, the "without authority" section is really part of the specific law dealing with larceny, and Campbell was not accused of stealing the car.

A person who has been authorized by the renter listed on the rental
agreement to use the vehicle during the rental period does not deprive the rental company of any short-term use to which it otherwise would have been entitled.

The court acknowledged the potential insurance issues should Campbell have gotten into an accident, but said that's a civil matter, not a criminal one:

While concern about collision damage waiver liability may be one
reason that rental agreements distinguish between authorized and unauthorized drivers, that question of civil liability in the event of an accident does not affect our interpretation of use "without authority" under G. L. c. 90, § 24 (2) (a), a criminal statute that imposes substantial penalties on those who violate it.

A renter's decision to allow a person who is not a permitted driver according to the rental agreement to drive a rental vehicle may be a breach of that agreement, but it does not also result in a violation of criminal law.

And so:

Based on our construction of G. L. c. 90, § 24 (2) (a), we conclude that [the trooper] lacked probable cause to determine that the defendant was using the rental vehicle without authority.

The Suffolk County District Attorney's office argued that even if that is so, the warrant for avoiding jury duty should have been enough to arrest Campbell and search his car.

The court, however, said there was no evidence the trooper - and another trooper who arrived to help - ever intended to arrest Campbell for that or that they learned of the warrant before they conducted the search.

The impoundment of the rental vehicle was not proper, because the police did not have probable cause to believe that the defendant was operating it in violation of G. L. c. 90, § 24 (2) (a), and it is not certain as a practical matter that they would have executed the default warrant and impounded the vehicle on that basis. Accordingly, the inventory search was not lawful, and the handgun and ammunition properly were suppressed.