DE rejects de minimus continuation of pretextual highway stop

Defendant’s car was stopped for a traffic offense and a pretext for a drug investigation. There was justification for the traffic stop but no reasonable suspicion for anything else. A de minimus Fourth Amendment violation is rejected as inconsistent with Arizona v. Johnson which had reasonable suspicion. Murray v. State, 45 A.3d 670 (2012):

This case, then, involves baseless police investigation after the conclusion of a traffic stop. The dissent nevertheless defends this continuing investigation, describing it as a de minimis intrusion. The first problem with this conception is that the relevant United States Supreme Court precedent focuses on whether police extended the traffic stop’s duration “measurably,” not on whether police extend the stop “significantly” or “substantially.” In Arizona v. Johnson, the Court said that “[a]n officer’s inquiries into matters unrelated to the justification for the traffic stop do not convert the encounter into something other than a lawful seizure, so long as those inquiries do not measurably extend the duration of a traffic stop.” In Johnson, the Court permitted an officer who suspected criminal activity on the strength of gang clothing, tattoos, and the presence of a police scanner radio to perform a protective patdown at the start of a traffic stop. That is, the ‘unrelated matters,’ in Johnson, were not matters that the officer dealt with after the traffic stop, but measures taken for self-protection at the very start of the traffic stop. None of the officers in this case spotted items in the car that provided a reasonable basis to think the car’s occupants posed a threat, nor did they conduct protective patdowns at the start of the encounter.