Maine’s high court on Thursday tossed a Bangor man’s drug trafficking conviction, ruling that a judge failed to adequately justify how long police detained him during a 2021 traffic stop that led police to find drugs on his body.
The 17-page decision from Maine Supreme Judicial Court sends Jeff Belony’s case back to a lower court, which must now determine whether Maine Drug Enforcement Agency officers and a Bangor police officer improperly prolonged the stop while investigating a tip that Belony was involved in drug trafficking.
Justice Andrew Mead, writing for the high court, found that the judge got the stop’s timeline wrong. The trial court said officers identified Belony within five or six minutes of the stop. But video evidence showed it took at least eight minutes and 48 seconds. The lower court also mixed up the sequence of events between a drug dog’s alert and Belony’s identification.
“[T]he court’s key findings pertaining to the timeframe and timeline of the stop are clearly erroneous,” Mead wrote.
The case dates to March 15, 2021, when Maine drug agents surveilled the Bangor bus terminal on a tip from informants about a trafficker known as “Heff.” A database search had turned up Belony as one of several people known by that name, and agents watched a Black man they believed to be him aboard the bus get into a Ford Focus.
Agents believed they lacked grounds to stop the car based on the tip alone, so the Bangor officer trailed the vehicle and pulled it over, citing an obscured license plate and a seat belt violation that turned out to be mistaken.
The high court upheld those two justifications for the initial stop. But it found the trial court never adequately addressed whether officers used the time before identifying Belony to pursue the drug investigation rather than the traffic violations, a distinction the U.S. Supreme Court set out in a landmark 2015 ruling.
Belony, whose passenger-side seat was not where a drug dog later alerted, was searched after his identification. Police found drugs on his body.
This was Belony’s second trip to the high court in less than a year and a half. Last March, the court dismissed his first appeal as untimely. Belony solved that issue by winning post-conviction relief after arguing his trial attorney was ineffective for missing a filing deadline.
The case now returns to court in Bangor, where state prosecutors and Belony’s attorney, Hunter Tzovarras, may reopen the suppression hearing.