Judge denies Lewiston man’s motion to suppress evidence in hit-and-run case

AUBURN — A judge Monday denied an effort by a Lewiston man to toss evidence from trial in a hit-and-run crash last year that seriously injured a pedestrian.

Brad Johnson Lewiston Police Department photo

Brad Johnson, 41, of 170 Old Webster Road filed a motion seeking to suppress evidence stemming from a Lewiston police officer’s probe that led to a pickup truck fitting the description of the vehicle involved.

Johnson has been indicted on charges of leaving the scene of an accident involving serious bodily injury or death, falsifying physical evidence and criminal operating under the influence.

On Oct. 27, 2019, Jason Stratton, 31, of Lewiston was found lying by the side of Lisbon Street in Lewiston with life-threatening injuries.

Based in part on parts of the vehicle left at the scene and analyzed for their make, model and year of manufacture, Lewiston police narrowed a search of suspects to those who drove a 2014 or newer gray Toyota Tundra. Also, based on the direction of travel of the suspect’s vehicle, police focused on Johnson. After going to his home and not seeing the truck, a police lieutenant went to Brad’s Precision Auto, Johnson’s auto body business in Auburn.

There, the officer found a truck with front-end damage that fit the description of the crash scene, Justice Roland A. Cole wrote in his decision released Monday in Androscoggin County Superior Court.

When an officer later executed the search warrant, he learned further incriminating evidence from an employee at the auto body shop.

Defense attorney Verne Paradie had had filed a motion arguing the initial examination of Johnson’s truck had constituted a warrantless search for which the officer had not established probable cause. He also argued the officer’s probe was unconstitutional because the truck was parked on private property and the officer had failed to secure a search warrant.

But Cole wrote that “The Fourth Amendment protects only those areas from intrusion where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

“What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection,” Cole quoted a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

“Government agents are free to search areas of commercial property that are held open to the public without obtaining a warrant,” Cole wrote.

It follows that appeals courts have ruled that “entry into parking lots with fencing, posting and other indication that they were closed to the public does not intrude on any Fourth Amendment rights,” he wrote.

Assistant District Attorney Molly Butler Bailey had argued during a Nov. 30 hearing on the suppression motion that the lot in which the truck was parked had no fencing nor posting and there was no indication that the public was barred from the property.

The truck could be seen from Riverside Drive, its back end facing the street.

The officer only examined the truck from its exterior, she said. Another officer took photos of the truck’s damage and the parts lying in the open bed of the truck that were used to secure a search warrant.

“The fact that Johnson parked his truck facing the woods does not mean that he had a greater expectation of privacy in the front of his (truck) than the back,” Cole wrote. “The front may have been more difficult to see from the street, but it is still part of the exterior of the vehicle parked in an open lot. Thus, Johnson knowingly exposed the truck to the public by parking it in that lot and cannot claim Fourth Amendment protection for a visual observation of the exterior of the vehicle.”

Two two pedestrians on Lisbon Street in Lewiston, near the Alfred A. Plourde Parkway overpass, heard someone calling from help from nearby bushes, Cole wrote.

The person was identified as Stratton and investigators determined he’d had been struck from behind by a vehicle that had left the scene.

The impact shattered Stratton’s pelvis, broke his arm and ankle, severely damaged his legs, and caused other injuries that led to kidney failure, pneumonia and near death.

He was taken to a Lewiston hospital for emergency treatment, then doctors placed him in a medically induced coma and attempted to raise his blood pressure enough to begin reconstructive surgery on his legs and pelvis.