{"id":5954,"date":"2011-12-28T17:24:02","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T00:14:35","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-08-27T14:56:40","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=5954","title":{"rendered":"MT: Defendant’s abrupt pulling off road in desolate area justified officer stopping to see if she needed assistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The officer was coming up on defendant\u2019s vehicle moving much slower, and she abruptly pulled off the road 200 yards in front of him. He turned on his emergency lights and stopped to see if she had a flat or engine trouble. When he talked to her, she said everything was fine, but she smelled of intoxicants. One thing led to another and she was arrested for DUI. The \u201cstop\u201d was a community caretaking inquiry, and reasonable suspicion developed from that. Even if there was a possible mixed motive, all the objective facts support the community caretaking stop. State v. Spaulding<\/a>, 2011 MT 204, 361 Mont. 445, 259 P.3d 793 (2011)*:<\/p>\n

It is true that the community caretaker doctrine cannot be used as a pretext for an illegal search and seizure. Lovegren, \u00b6 23. For this reason, we require that a welfare check be based on objective, specific, and articulable facts from which an officer would suspect that a citizen is in need of help or is in peril, Lovegren, \u00b6 25, and that the stop actually involve a welfare check, see e.g. Graham, \u00b6\u00b6 30-31 (the officer’s admitted purpose was not to conduct a welfare check, but rather to \u201cmove [the defendant] along\u201d); State v. Reiner, 2003 MT 243, \u00b6\u00b6 21-22, 317 Mont. 304, 77 P.3d 210 (the officer did not stop out of concern for the defendant being in peril or in need of assistance, but rather to commence an investigation based on a report of a possibly intoxicated driver); Seaman, \u00b6 30 (the officer’s initial questions reflected his concern for the defendant’s well-being); cf. State v. Nelson, 2004 MT 13, \u00b6 9, 319 Mont. 250, 84 P.3d 25 (even if the officer suspected that the defendant’s license was suspended, the primary purpose of her stop was to determine whether any possible occupants of the vehicle needed assistance).<\/p>\n

[*P25] In the present case, there were objective, specific, and articulable facts from which an officer would suspect that a citizen was in peril or in need of help. The vehicle pulled over abruptly, while Croft was still 200 yards away. In Croft’s experience, this indicated that the driver might have a flat tire or car troubles. They were on a back road in a desolate area, out \u201cin the middle of nowhere,\u201d and the road was \u201cnot a very well-travelled road.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}