Court says police had a good enough reason for a warrantless search of a man's backpack that led to his conviction for gunning down somebody in Roxbury in 2017

The Massachusetts Appeals Court yesterday upheld Charles Williams's second-degree murder conviction for the death of Dennis Parham, shot in the head on Shawmut Avenue at Kendall Street in Roxbury's Lenox housing development the night of July 15, 2017.

Key evidence against Williams included a gun and bullets matching those that killed Parham, a father of four.

Williams's attorney appealed his sentence because of the way Boston Police officers found the gun and bullets: More than three months after Parham's murder, they concluded Parham was the suspect and went to arrest him at his girlfriend's Brighton apartment. They watched as he came out with a backpack, got into a car and put the backpack on the seat next to him, at which point they swarmed the car and arrested him - initially leaving the backpack untouched in the car. Only later did they recover the backpack and one officer rummaged through it, finding the gun and ammo.

Williams's attorney argued this was a violation of his client's Fourth Amendment right against improper search and seizure, or as the court summarized:

The defendant argues that because the backpack was not on his person at the time of his arrest, and was not seized or searched until after he had been handcuffed and removed from the scene, the seizure and search cannot be justified as a search incident to arrest, or on any other basis that would provide an exception to the warrant requirement.

The court, however, disagreed. It noted that had officers arrested him the night of the shooting, carrying the backpack, there would have been nothing wrong with seizing and searching it as part of the arrest - and even when he actually was arrested, there would have been nothing wrong with opening the backpack at the police station to do a standard inventory search, which would have quickly led to the discovery of the gun and bullets.

But more important, legally, the police had probable cause to seize and search the backpack without a warrant, under a 2009 Supreme Court decision that held such potential evidence could be seized when it is "reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle," the court concluded.

But was the evidence legally "stale" - because it was seized more than three months after the alleged crime, so there was no way to show a link between it, its owner and the crime in question even before ballistics tests? The court concluded that, no, something like a gun does not go "stale," that it is actually legally "durable" or something the person getting arrested might have continued to keep with him in the intervening time. "Firearms are durable and of enduring value to their holder," the court wrote. "They are not frequently or easily transferred or discarded."

Plus, the court continued, there was no evidence Williams knew the cops were hunting him until the moment he was arrested. And then there was the matter of his prior gun-related arrests, in 1998 and 2005 (he was also tried twice for murdering another man a half block from where Parham died, in 2009, he was acquitted at his second trial after a hung jury in his first).

In short, the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness; here there was a "reasonable likelihood" that the defendant still had the gun he had used, and that the defendant would keep that gun on his person or somewhere it was readily available. There was probable cause to search those areas when the defendant was arrested on November 5, 2017; a warrant would have been required to search the defendant's home, but no warrant was required to search the backpack located in the car in which he was apprehended.