IL: When a vehicle is stopped because of a warrant on owner, even when discovered owner not driving, officer can ask for DL

Defendant’s van was pulled over because there was a warrant for the owner, a woman. The man driving could not be the owner, and the officer asked for his DL, which was permissible and lawfully incident to the stop under the Fourth Amendment. People v. Cummings, 2016 IL 115769, 2016 Ill. LEXIS 248 (Jan. 22, 2016), prior decision People v. Cummings, 2014 IL 115769, 379 Ill. Dec. 397, 6 N.E.3d 725 (2014), GVR’d in light of Rodriguez, 135 S. Ct. 1892 (2015), and affirmed]:

[*P17] Defendant’s argument that the State must show how driver’s license checks advance the interest in officer safety in this case, likewise, is foreclosed by Rodriguez’s favorable citation of Holt. Warrant checks and criminal history checks without reasonable suspicion were deemed permissible as “certain negligibly burdensome precautions in order to complete [the officer’s] mission safely.” Id. at ___, 135 S. Ct. at 1616. Thus, where a traffic stop is lawfully initiated, the interest in officer safety entitles the officer to know the identity of a driver with whom he is interacting. If the permissible inquiries include warrant and criminal history checks, as the Rodriguez Court found, they necessarily include less invasive driver’s license requests. Accordingly, the State need not make any special showing that driver’s license requests, as a less invasive precursor to already-permissible criminal history checks, achieve some additional safety goal.

[*P18] Officer Bland’s stop of defendant was lawfully initiated. Though his reasonable suspicion the driver was subject to arrest vanished upon seeing defendant, Bland could still make the ordinary inquiries incident to a stop. The interest in officer safety permits a driver’s license request of a driver lawfully stopped. Such ordinary inquiries are part of the stop’s mission and do not prolong the stop, for fourth amendment purposes.