Several Illinois courts have held that a police officer may form a reasonable suspicion that an individual was involved in a shooting due to his spatial and temporal proximity to the shots fired. For example, in People v. Lee, 48 Ill. 2d 272 (1971), police officers testified that they were assigned to patrol an area where a gang war was expected to occur. At approximately 9:30 p.m., the officers heard what they believed to be gunshots.
Notably, even prior to Long, this court read Terry and Illinois' codification of its holding to permit such seizures. See People v. Lee (1971), 48 Ill.2d 272; see also Ill. Rev. Stat. 1971, ch. 38, pars. 107-14, 108-1.01. The notion of "plain touch" is not foreign to Illinois.
Adams, supra, 407 U.S. at 146. See People v. Lee (1971), 48 Ill.2d 272, 269 N.E.2d 488. Analyzing Deputy Garst's conduct here against the objective standard required by Terry, and based on the totality of the circumstances, we hold that he acted properly in conducting a protective search of Williams.
To justify a "stop and frisk" of a person, police officers must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant the intrusion. ( Terry v. Ohio (1968), 392 U.S. 1, 20 L.Ed.2d 889, 88 S.Ct. 1868; People v. Lee (1971), 48 Ill.2d 272, 269 N.E.2d 488.) The facts justifying a "stop and frisk" need not be sufficient to establish probable cause to arrest.
The State argues that the motion to suppress was properly denied because the officers lawfully detained the defendants pursuant to section 107-14 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1973, ch. 38, par. 107-14) and obtained sufficient information during that detention to form the probable cause necessary to arrest the defendants without a warrant and seized evidence pursuant to a valid search incident to that arrest. • 1, 2 In People v. Lee (1971), 48 Ill.2d 272, 269 N.E.2d 488, the Illinois Supreme Court held that this section is a legislative codification of the holding of the Supreme Court of the United States in Terry v. Ohio (1968), 392 U.S. 1, 20 L.Ed.2d 889, 88 S.Ct. 1868, and that the tests enunciated in Terry are the standards for determining whether a stop by a police officer falls within the ambit of section 107-14. Under Terry the "stop" itself must be justified by "specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion." ( 392 U.S. 1, 21, 20 L.Ed.2d 889, 906.)
" The above statutes represent a codification of the holdings in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, and Sibron v. New York, 392 U.S. 40. ( People v. Lee, 48 Ill.2d 272, 269 N.E.2d 488), which impose three restrictions upon the right of policemen to "stop and frisk" individuals suspected of criminal acts. First, the "stop" itself must be justified by "specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion." ( Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21.) Inarticulate hunches cannot suffice; rather, the objective determination to be made is whether "the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure * * * warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that the action taken was appropriate.
That distance is farther than the one or two blocks many courts have considered close for purposes of supporting reasonable suspicion when an officer immediately responded to gunshots and found only one person or group in the area. SeeTally-Clayborne at ¶ 10 (one block); Commonwealth v. Griffen-Jacobs , Penn.Sup.Ct. No. 1891 EDA 2016, 2017 WL 4992754, *1 (Nov. 1, 2017) (approximately one block); Basiak at 156, 8 Ill.Dec. 332, 365 N.E.2d 570 (around the corner); State v. Brooks , 281 So.2d 55, 56 (Fla.App.1973) (around the block); People v. Lee , 48 Ill.2d 272, 274, 269 N.E.2d 488 (1971) (about two blocks). {¶ 44} Even in cases in which the location of the gunshots was very close, however, courts have typically relied on additional evidence—that directly implicated the defendant—to support a finding of reasonable suspicion.
Our supreme court has held that once a reasonable belief of danger arises, “the type of search authorized in Terry is one confined in scope to an intrusion reasonably designed to discover weapons or objects capable of use as weapons.” People v. Lee, 48 Ill.2d 272, 276, 269 N.E.2d 488, 491 (1971) (citing Terry, 392 U.S. at 29, 88 S.Ct. 1868). “The sole justification for the search allowed by the Terry exception is the protection of the police officer and others in the vicinity, not to gather evidence.”
Defendant argues that the State failed to prove his conviction beyond a reasonable doubt because it did not introduce evidence that the ammunition was live. The supreme court considered and rejected the argument defendant makes in People v. Lee, 48 Ill. 2d 272, 281, 269 N.E.2d 488, 493 (1971). The Lee court held that the statute did not require proof that the ammunition was live to sustain a conviction, stating as follows:
The State contends that the totality of the facts articulated by Officer Nallen provided sufficient reasonable suspicion to justify the frisk or protective pat-down of respondent. We find People v. Lee, 48 Ill.2d 272 (1971), instructive. In Lee, the police were assigned to patrol an area where a gang war was expected to occur.