Street sense vs. nonsense

Sometime around 4 a.m., he spied a couple of men standing in a doorway on Stuart Street, a block from where two months earlier police had shot dead a man moments after he had killed another guy.

Walsh recognized one of the men in the doorway as Paul Gomes, whose mug shot he had noticed on a bulletin board at the police station before his shift. Gomes was what the cops call an "impact player," a title earned from a prior drug arrest and a street rep in the Grove Hall section of Dorchester.

Walsh guessed that Gomes and the other fellow were not discussing the merits of the performance of "The Nutcracker" that had ended at the Wang Center six hours earlier.

It was an educated guess, because he is trained to observe certain things and he observed Gomes holding his right hand out, palm up. This is known as showing the product. When Walsh stopped and got out of his cruiser, he saw Gomes pop whatever he had in his hand into his mouth. This is known as swallowing the product.

Walsh patted Gomes down for a weapon, which seems an eminently reasonable thing to do.

The Supreme Judicial Court disagreed. Greg Walsh, a 5-to-1 majority found, was very, very disrespectful toward Paul Gomes and the Fourth Amendment.

You see, as Walsh patted Gomes down, five packets of crack cocaine fell out of Gomes's pants leg. This led Greg Walsh to place Gomes under arrest. When they brought him to the station, they found that Gomes, who at the time was approximately the size of the Tobin Bridge, had another 45 packets of rock tucked in the roll of fat that was his rather ample waistline.

But the state's highest court ruled that Walsh had no reason to pat Gomes down, so it's like those 50 packets of crack didn't exist. This, despite the fact that Gomes worked in a business where guns and drugs go together like franks and beans.

"In the circumstances here, the degree of police intrusion was not proportionate to the articulable risk to officer safety and, therefore, was constitutionally impermissible," the majority sniffed.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that neither Justice Francis Spina nor any of the other four judges who joined his opinion bothered to mosey around the Theatre District in the wee, small hours of the morning before wagging their fingers at Walsh. I spent a few hours there yesterday, and this is what I saw: Between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., after the clubs and bars let out, there are many, many people walking around under the influence of everything but common sense. Some walk toward Chinatown: starve a cold, feed a hangover. Others linger on corners.

Some are dressed to the nines. Others, who spill from Emerson College dorms, are in jeans.

All are in the demographic, and in some cases the state of mind, that make them, at that hour, potential customers for the likes of Paul Gomes.

By 4 a.m., the streets were mostly deserted, except for taxis and street sweepers, and, noticeably, young couples walking.

Gomes, who in 2006 got a minimum 7 1/2 years for a second drug offense, will soon walk free, and no doubt the good people of Grove Hall are anxiously awaiting his return to the bosom of their neighborhood.

His freedom comes courtesy of judges who sit in a courthouse where everyone who enters is presumed, absent any evidence, capable of carrying a weapon and is forced to go through a metal detector. Some are patted down.

Greg Walsh's metal detector is in his head.

It's called experience and common sense, the latter of which was nowhere to be found in the majority decision in Commonwealth v. Paul Gomes.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com