TX: No per se rule illegal stop voids arrest on outstanding warrant

Defendant was illegally stopped for a traffic offense, but it was not flagrantly illegal. When the defendant’s DL was run, an outstanding warrant was found on him, and he was arrested for that. After surveying the law, the court decides that there is no per se rule requiring the finding of the outstanding warrant be suppressed. It is a concern that its holding would potentially encourage illegal stops, but the court is not persuaded that always is the case. Remanded for further proceedings. State v. Mazuca, 2012 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 697 (May 23, 2012) (dissent here and here):

We agree with the Arizona Supreme Court’s general assessment. In our view, the first Brown factor is certainly relevant, but, even though it usually favors suppression of evidence that is discovered in the immediate aftermath of an illegal pedestrian or roadside stop, it will sometimes prove to be, in the context of the seizure of physical evidence, “the least important factor”—at least relative to the other two. And while we are hesitant to confirm as a categorical matter that the intervening circumstance of a valid arrest warrant is “of minimal importance”—after all, without it, there can usually be no attenuation of taint when physical evidence is unearthed immediately after an illegal stop—we agree that it should not be overemphasized to the ultimate detriment to the goal of deterrence that animates the exclusionary rule. Finally, we agree that the more important factor is the purposefulness and flagrancy, vel non, of the primary illegal conduct—whether the police have deliberately perpetrated what they know to be an illegal stop in the specific hope or expectation that it will generate some legitimate after-the-fact justification to arrest and/or search, or they have otherwise conducted themselves in particularly egregious disregard of the right to privacy and/or personal integrity that the Fourth Amendment protects. For, when this is the case, to admit the physical evidence because of the fortuity that an arrest warrant happens to come to light before the evidence is discovered perversely serves to encourage, rather than discourage, official misconduct and renders the Fourth Amendment toothless.

To summarize: When police find and seize physical evidence shortly after an illegal stop, in the absence of the discovery of an outstanding arrest warrant in between, that physical evidence should ordinarily be suppressed, even if the police misconduct is not highly purposeful or flagrantly abusive of Fourth Amendment rights. Under this scenario, temporal proximity is the paramount factor. But when an outstanding arrest warrant is discovered between the illegal stop and the seizure of physical evidence, the importance of the temporal proximity factor decreases. Under this scenario, the intervening circumstance is a necessary but never, by itself, wholly determinative factor in the attenuation calculation, and the purposefulness and/or flagrancy of the police misconduct, vel non, becomes of vital importance. To the extent that our pre-Brown analysis on direct appeal in Johnson placed practically exclusive emphasis on the intervening circumstance of an arrest warrant to justify the admission of evidence following an illegal stop, we disapprove it.

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The court of appeals nevertheless affirmed the judgment of the trial court out of what it deemed an overriding concern that a contrary ruling would “encourage” the police to undertake unlawful stops on a pretext, “for the purpose of establishing probable cause or discovering the existence of arrest warrants.” We certainly share that concern. However, we think that prioritizing the purposefulness and flagrancy factor satisfactorily addresses that concern without fashioning a rule that would altogether remove the intervening discovery of an arrest warrant as a factor relevant to the attenuation of taint analysis, as the court of appeals opinion tended to do. The court of appeals adopted an approach that would effectively presume purposeful and/or flagrant police misconduct from the fact of the primary illegality alone rather than assessing the character of that illegality, and of any subsequent police conduct, to determine whether it indicates that they actually behaved purposefully or flagrantly in the particular case. We hold that the court of appeals erred to rely upon this de facto presumption to affirm the trial court’s ruling on the appellee’s motion to suppress. Applying the appropriate analysis today, we hold that the trial court should have denied that motion.