State v. Edmonds/State
v. Cobb, 2012 VT 81.
Today’s case seems like the response to a cocktail party
question: Can a police officer pull a car over if the computer says the owner’s
licensed is suspended?
The answer, not too surprisingly, is yes.
The defendants in the consolidated cases were going about
their business in an innocuous manner, but both were driving despite having
suspended licenses. In each case, the
defendants were pulled over because a trooper ran a random plate check on their
cars and learned that the owners had a suspended license. In each case, the trooper pulled the driver
over, confirmed that the owner was the operator, and cited him for driving with
a suspended license.
The sole question on appeal is whether the Troopers’ actions—running
a plate check, learning that the owner had a suspended license, and noticing
that the driver was the same gender as the owner—was constitutionally sufficient
to create the reasonable suspicion necessary for a warrantless stop.
Under both the Vermont Constitution (Article 11) and the
United States Constitution (4th Amendment), individuals are protected from unreasonable
searches or seizures. This usually means
that police if they want to search an individual, their car, or their homes have
to have a warrant. But courts have long
held that police may stop individuals with what is known in the game as “reasonable
suspicion.”
In this respect, Reasonable suspicion is defined as the
union of a few specific facts coupled with rational inferences from those facts
that lead to a “reasonable belief that a suspect is engaging in criminal
activity.”
What that means for today’s case is that the Troopers took the
specific facts—1) owner has a suspended license and 2) a person of the same
gender as owner was driving the car—and coupled it with an inference—that the
owner was operating the car. This equaled
a reasonable belief that the owner was engaging in the criminal activity of
driving with a suspended license, which merited a stop to confirm or disprove
this belief.
The SCOV finds no error in this reasoning and rejects
Defendants arguments to the contrary. The
case does not appear to be close. While
this is a question the SCOV has not previously ruled upon, the vast majority of
jurisdictions that have considered it have ruled that such facts and inference amount
to a reasonable suspicion. In fact, the
Defendants can only find one case from an intermediate appellate court in
Virginia that ruled the other way.
The big problem for Defendants is that they apparently made
no particular argument challenging the inference at the heart of the state’s
case. If it was irrational for the
trooper to infer that the male driver was likely the male owner of the car,
then the stops would have been unconstitutional because they would have been
unreasonable. To prove this, though, the
Defendants would have had to show that owners don’t drive their own cars or
that a sufficient number of owners lend out their cars enough of the time that
the link between driver and operator was relatively meaningless.
It is a tall task, and one that the Defendants probably did
not have the resources to mount. So they
were left with arguing the broader position that the Troopers needed more facts
(perhaps, age, race, height, hair) before the inference was reasonable.
The problem with this is that the inference does not need
more facts. If Bob Smith owns a car, and
you see someone who could be a “Bob Smith” operating the car, it is rational to
conclude that the operator is Bob Smith.
It is rational because of the syllogism: cars are usually operated by
their owners; this car is being operated by a person; therefore that person is
the owner. It is logical, and therefore
rational.
The irony, of course, is that the fewer facts there are the
easier the inference is. Then again, the
whole issue here is reasonable suspicion to pull the car over to confirm. The threshold, arguably, should be low. It allows a Trooper to easily confirm whether
a driver is driving with a suspended license, which is against the law. It is in the public interest to confirm such
facts, and a reasonable suspicion is a basic threshold for a limited stop
(nothing more).
The counter-argument is that such stops are often the
pretext used by police to start a larger search that is usually premised on
evidence collected during the stop (emanating odors of alcohol, anyone?), and
the easier the first step is the easier it will be for police to exploit a
relatively minor stop into an invasive and ultimately unreasonable search.
In this case, though, the events do not illustrate such
concerns as the stops ended in a citation for the reasonable suspicion that
instigated the stop. In other words, the
system worked, and there is no reason to overturn it on hypothetical concerns.
So Defendants’ convictions are upheld. And drivers with suspended licenses are
hereby notified that they should probably take the bus—or at least their friend’s
car.
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