N.D.Ill.: Court does not believe officer on cause for stop and suppresses

If you think police officers will stop people and make up a cause, see this case where the court just does not buy the justification for the stop after listening to the officer testify. United States v. Williams, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 101961 (N.D. Ill. November 3, 2009):

Officer Simon’s professed strategy for effecting the desired search and arrest makes little sense. According to his testimony, he approached the vehicle knowing that he lacked his own probable cause, even assuming Williams and Howard were not wearing their seat belts. He therefore approached the vehicle knowing that he would have to find something in plain view to justify a further search of the vehicle or its passengers. Thus, on his own account, Officer Simon enlisted luck to deliver the probable cause he needed but lacked–and luck of course came through for him. But to accept this account, the court would have to accept that Officer Simon was prepared to let Williams and Howard be on their way with only a traffic citation–no search, no arrest–in the event that no contraband or weapons could be found in plain view. That would have been remarkable, since the whole point of the traffic stop was to arrest Williams and Howard. Simply put, Officer Simon was going to stop Williams and Howard one way or another, whether they committed any minor traffic violations or not; that, indeed, was his assignment. His explanation for why he stopped Williams and Howard, therefore, cannot be fully candid, and either seatbelt infractions were not the basis for the stop or Williams and Howard were wearing their seatbelts after all. It makes no difference which is in fact the case; the point is that Officer Simon was not candid and his testimony was not believable.

Officer Simon’s account of the traffic stop would have been far more credible had he acknowledged the simple truth that he was going to stop Williams and Howard one way or another. Instead of candor, however, Officer Simon relied entirely on the seatbelt-violation rationale for the traffic stop and a less-than-straightforward story about what each officer believed and observed to back it up. The problem with being candid in this context is, of course, that Officer Simon needed to provide some basis for the stop without falling back on the probable cause he presumed DEA to have. But the fact that he was in a bind in no way bolsters the credibility of his account; on the contrary, it underscores his strong incentives to tell a story like the one he told–whether or not it was true.

Most importantly, these failures of credibility vitiate the crucial element of Officer Simon’s account: that, as luck would have it, the officers immediately noticed marijuana in two plain-view locations in the SUV, Williams and Howard apparently having made no attempt to close the ashtray or sweep away the “crumbs” before the officers arrived at their vehicle. Now, Williams and Howard may have been fatally careless or too stoned to react sensibly, for all the court knows. But there was no testimony or mention in the police reports of any signs of intoxication, and such explanations would in any event be far easier to credit if Officer Simon’s earlier testimony had been believable. Williams, for his part, does not deny that he had two small bags of marijuana in his pocket and two unsmoked joints in the ashtray; he does not attempt to argue that evidence was planted. He claims only that he closed the ashtray before the officers arrived at the vehicle and that he didn’t just leave marijuana sitting around, in plain view, for two approaching officers to see–while he had a kilogram of cocaine in the back seat.

Considering all the factors that bear on the credibility of Officer Simon’s testimony–his manner of testifying; his incentives to tell a story like the one he told, which otherwise makes little sense; his objective of searching and arresting Williams and Howard on whatever grounds he could muster; and, as he would have it, his confident reliance on sheer luck to achieve that objective–the court cannot credit the essential lynchpin of his story, his wholly fortuitous discovery of marijuana in plain view. In the circumstances of this case, it is far more plausible that the officers found the marijuana while performing the search they were out to perform, one way or another.

[Note, this post and the following one were accidentally posted to lawofcriminaldefense.com last night. Things like that happen when I try to do two things at once.]