Defendant raised the issue of an illegal stop for the first time at the close of the state’s case during a jury trial. The failure to file a pretrial motion is a waiver, without good cause, and there was no conceivable good cause here. State v. Vaughn, 2007 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 656 (August 14, 2007).* The court never says it, but it does not have to: The search was justified as an inventory after defendant’s arrest after a long police chase where the defendant and his passenger were able to elude the police because they were listening to a scanner and learned of where they had roadblocks set up. After the stop was an inventory of the car that produced a mobile meth lab.<\/p>\n
Police were called by the operator of an RV park that the same car kept showing up and hanging around the bathroom there over a period of weeks. An officer arrived and talked with the occupants, one of whom got out to meet with the officer. The other locked the car and walked off, just as the narcs arrived. They asked the first officer “if he was done” with that person, he said no, so they went and detained her. She resisted and was handcuffed. A drug dog was called and alerted on the car. There was no exploitation of the arrest to find the drugs, and they also had probable cause. State v. Keene<\/a>, Docket No. 32504, 2007 Opinion No. 56, 144 Idaho 915, 174 P.3d 885 (2007):<\/p>\n Here, Keene has not met her initial burden of showing a factual nexus between her detention and the discovery of drugs in her vehicle. The police did not gain any information from arresting Keene that caused them to search the vehicle, and because [*8] Keene had already walked away from the vehicle before she was seized, we see no way that the canine sniff and ensuing search resulted from an exploitation of the allegedly illegal arrest.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the police had justification to detain and search the vehicle that was totally independent of their contact with Keene. During the initial consensual encounter, Saldana told the officer that he had been at the R.V. park the night before. That was the night Officer Cazier had seen two people in a brown Mercury Grand Marquis leave the R.V. park and had heard the R.V. park host describe possible drug activity involving other persons visiting the Grand Marquis over a period of weeks. This individualized, specific information amounted to reasonable suspicion that Saldana was engaged in the illicit drug trade and that the car had recently been used to transport drugs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Police had probable cause for search warrant based on various sources, including debriefing a disinterested witness who told them about guns, ammo, and drugs on the premises. [PC here was not even a close call.] The original argument was premises on a search occurring before the warrant issued, but that argument had to be abandoned at the suppression hearing when defendant conceded that he could not prove that the search occurred before the warrant issued. And, in any event, the warrant was relied upon in good faith [but stated conclusorily]. United States v. Garner, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60346 (N.D. Ind. August 16, 2007).*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading