State of Arkansas v. Christopher Coy Gamble

Searcy, Arkansas, criminal defense lawyer represented the Defendant charged with capitol murder.

On August 17, 2020, Searcy police officers went to Van Stevens’s residence for a welfare check. They discovered that Stevens had been brutally murdered––stabbed
2thirty-one times and subjected to blunt-force trauma that fractured his skull. In the ensuinginvestigation, police focused on Gamble as a suspect based on his proximity in time and place to the crime.

Gamble was on parole when he committed the crimes he was charged with. Due to prior interactions with him, the Searcy Police were familiar with Gamble. Gamble’s latest encounter with police prior to the murder occurred on August 15, 2020. Officers Christopher Smith and Spenser Dangerfield were dispatched to the local housing authority on a suspicious-person call. The officers made contact with Gamble. As a parolee, Gamble was subject to a search waiver, so Smith and Dangerfield searched the truck Gamble wassitting in and found a pair of black Puma tennis shoes, which Gamble said were his. They also found a knife on the front-passenger seat. Officer Dangerfield searched Gamble’s tan Eastport backpack, which contained documents bearing Gamble’s name and identifying information, cigarettes, a lightbulb, a sparkplug, and various electrical cords and wires. Gamble complained of medical issues, and the officers called an EMS to transport him to the emergency room and returned his belongings to him. These belongings would later help tie Gamble to the Stevens murder.

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So,while this court previously claimed that pretextual arrests “are unreasonable police conduct warranting application of the exclusionary rule[,]” Sullivan, 348 Ark. at 656, 74 S.W.3d at 221, such an assertion is wrong. It is not unreasonable to arrest someone for a lesser crime (when there is probable cause for that arrest) if the real motivation of the police is to investigate a more serious crime. This is the Supreme Court’s take on the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement and that of all but one other state. Whren, 517 U.S. at819. The officer’s subjective intent for making the arrest is irrelevant if there is probable cause for that arrest. See, e.g.,Nieves v. Bartlett, 587 U.S. 391, 403(2019). In fact, it is objectively unreasonable to not let police arrest a murder suspect for a lesser crime just because the police do not yet have probable cause to make an arrest for murder.

The Defendant was found guilty.

Affirmed