VT: 1:30 am encounter with sleeping def in car in rest area by two officers required reasonable suspicion

Defendant was asleep in his girlfriend’s car in a rest area on I-91 in Vermont at 1 am. A state trooper ran LPNs in the parking lot and saw that the DL of the female owner of the car was suspended. He looked in the car and saw a man. He didn’t do anything then. He went back to the patrol car and ran a computer check and found the DL of a man at the same address as the woman owner also was suspended. He went back to the car and woke defendant up. Defendant said that he hit a deer in Massachusetts, broke a headlight, and was told by the Massachusetts state trooper at that scene that he shouldn’t drive with one headlight. He said he was waiting for his girlfriend to pick him up. The officer gave no ticket and told him to “rack out.” The officer ran defendant’s criminal history and found he had prior drug arrests. A second state trooper was called to join. They came and woke him up again, this time questioning him about drugs. The questions of this encounter were far more serious, about drugs and whether defendant was into drugs, and required reasonable suspicion. The stop was without reasonable suspicion, and it is suppressed. State v. Winters, 2015 VT 116, 2015 Vt. LEXIS 90 (September 4, 2015).

This is a classic kind of the argument for the “right to be let alone,” Treatise § 2.21. Yes, defendant had a suspended DL, but the officer never saw him driving. Woke him up, told him to go back to sleep, and then woke him up again, with backup, just to question him about drugs.