Court, Faulting Police Questioning, Overturns Gun Conviction Two New York City police officers had been patrolling inside a public housing building in a drug-prone neighborhood in the Bronx when they saw a young man walking down the stairs. The young man, seeing the police, "froze" and "jerked back" but did not flee. Did the police have the right to ask the man if he lived in the building? A state appellate panel, in a split decision, ruled on Tuesday that the police did not have sufficient grounds to make such an inquiry. Ultimately, the officers" stopping of the young man, Jeffrey Johnson, led to the discovery that he was carrying a gun, for which he was convicted in 2010 of illegal possession of a weapon. Tuesday's ruling, by the First Department of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, overturned that conviction. The ruling also provided a glimpse into the difficult snap decisions police officers must make every day in balancing individual liberty and public safety. In finding for Mr. Johnson, the five-judge panel did not address broader questions about the Police Department's application of its stop-and-frisk policy, which a federal judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found unconstitutional two weeks ago. Instead, the court examined a more basic question: When can the police stop and ask someone a question? And what if that person is in a public housing building? Or a high-crime neighborhood? The majority's decision rested in part on a 2006 ruling by the state's top court that determined that an officer is allowed to request information from a person if there is an "objective, credible reason, not necessarily indicative of criminality." Mr. Johnson's behavior before he was questioned did not meet that standard, the court found. "It is yet another state court ruling that the ends don't justify the means," said Steven Banks, the chief lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, which represented Mr. Johnson. The Bronx district attorney's office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment on the ruling. The court noted that when the prosecutor asked one of the two officers who stopped Mr. Johnson why they had done so, the officer responded that they are allowed to ask anyone questions in a public housing building, later adding that it was in a drug-prone neighborhood. When the police asked Mr. Johnson if he lived in the building, he initially said he was a resident, according to court records. However, when asked for identification, he changed his story and said he was visiting a girlfriend. Mr. Johnson then fumbled about, looking for his identification, leading an officer to take him by the arm, at which point the officer saw a gun under Mr. Johnson's jacket. Justices Karla Moskowitz, Helen E. Freedman and Sallie Manzanet-Daniels, voting for the majority, ruled that since the initial questioning was illegal, the gun itself could not be admitted into evidence. "Although subsequent events led to an otherwise lawful stop-and-frisk, those events were the result of an unauthorized encounter," the court ruled. In the dissenting opinion, written by Richard T. Andrias and joined by Paul G. Feinman, greater emphasis was placed on the officers" description of both the initial encounter with Mr. Johnson and his later behavior. "Defendant's abrupt, halting and furtive movements provided the police with an objective credible reason for asking defendant if he was a resident of the New York City Housing Authority building, and subsequent events led to a lawful stop-and-frisk," Justice Andrias wrote. He noted the role that the police play as custodians of public housing buildings, writing that their "duties include keeping the buildings free of trespassers."