In an area of criminal law that has drawn some recent scrutiny from appellate courts in Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case over whether an officer's request for a man's identification turned the underlying encounter from a "mere encounter" into an "investigative detention."
The high court's decision in the matter of Commonwealth v. Lyles will resolve whether a Philadelphia judge properly suppressed the drugs police found on Haleem Lyles in 2009. If the circumstances do not rise to the level of an investigative detention, the high court will likely affirm the state Superior Court, which reversed the trial court's decision to suppress the evidence. If the circumstances were an investigative detention, then the court would seemingly be constrained by the trial court's factual finding that the officer didn't have reasonable suspicion and would be bound to suppress the evidence.
