Post details: MD: Removal of occupants from car is irrelevant if there is cause for stop

02/08/10

Permalink 12:27:51 am, by fourth, 346 words, 86 views   English (US)
Categories: General

MD: Removal of occupants from car is irrelevant if there is cause for stop

Defendant's removal from the car is "utterly immaterial" to the question of the cause for the stop. The eight minutes for the dog to arrive was not unreasonable. Jackson v. State, 190 Md. App. 497, 988 A.2d 1154 (2010). This is another entertaining opinion by Retired Judge Moylan, inter alia, describing the Arvizu/Sokolow totality of the circumstances approach as "If It Looks Like a Duck and Walks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck…":

. . . As long as the automobile itself was being constitutionally detained as of the moment the dog made its positive alert, whatever may have been happening to the appellant in the meantime, good or bad, is utterly immaterial.

Whether the appellant was being royally wined and dined, on the one hand, or was being greeted as if exiting the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, on the other, is an extraneous consideration that had no impact on the legitimacy of the dog sniff. For other purposes, of course, it may have made a great deal of difference. We are not suggesting otherwise. We are simply stressing the point, perhaps starkly so, that the treatment of the appellant as a person, whether exemplary or deplorable, was not a factor in the suppression syllogism. The appellant was being lawfully detained. The degree of restraint, minimal or maximal, did not influence, therefore, the fact that the car was properly still in place when the dog arrived. All that matters is that the appellant was not free to drive the car away. Any restraint on him beyond that point, even if excessive, did not affect the immobility of the car.

Every Fourth Amendment violation, assuming one to have occurred, does not, in and of itself, require the suppression of evidence. To justify the exclusion of evidence, it is further required that the discovery of the evidence shall have been the proximate result of the Fourth Amendment violation.

Conclusion

Once we have filtered out the extraneous static, we are left with a legitimate stop followed by a legitimate eight-minute detention followed by a legitimate dog sniff. That's all there is to it.

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