IL: Kentucky officers investigated aggravated DUI with an accident on Ohio River bridge; remanded for findings of GFE

Defendant was involved in an accident on the Brookport Bridge between Illinois and Kentucky, and he was originally charged in Kentucky. On closer examination, the accident was determined to be in Illinois, so that case was dismissed, and it was filed in Illinois. The boundary was determined in Illinois v. Kentucky, 513 U.S. 177 (1995), from 1792 markers on the northern low water mark. The two states had an agreement: Kentucky police patrolled the bridge, and Illinois maintained the bridge. “It was undisputed that all of the law enforcement officers who responded to the collision on the Brookport Bridge believed that the accident had occurred within Kentucky’s jurisdiction.” The state conceded the Kentucky officers were outside their jurisdiction. Illinois courts would apply the exclusionary rule to extraterritorial police action, but no finding was made on application of the good faith exception. People v. Lambert, 2019 IL App (5th) 180248, 2019 Ill. App. LEXIS 302 (May 3, 2019):

[*P36] As noted, when partially granting the defendant’s motion to suppress, the circuit court found that all of the officers who had responded to the scene of the accident had mistakenly believed that Kentucky had jurisdiction over any incident that occurred on the Brookport Bridge. The court did not consider, however, whether the responding officers had acted with an objectively reasonable good-faith belief that their conduct was lawful, whether the officers’ mistake of fact was reasonable, whether a reasonably well-trained officer would have known that his conduct was illegal in light of all of the circumstances, or whether excluding the evidence at issue had any deterrent value. Because the exclusion of evidence is a court’s ‘last resort’ (Burns, 2016 IL 118973, ¶ 51), we conclude that the court should not have ignored the State’s good-faith argument and should have denied the defendant’s motion to suppress in its entirety. We accordingly reverse the portion of the court’s judgment that granted the motion with respect to the evidence obtained at the McCracken County jail. The court’s judgment is otherwise affirmed, and the cause is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this decision.