{"id":7627,"date":"2012-08-24T08:12:33","date_gmt":"2012-08-24T08:11:47","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-24T08:11:47","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=7627","title":{"rendered":"D.Utah: Mexican driver’s license no reason to impound a car"},"content":{"rendered":"

Defendant was the driver and sole occupant of the car searched. Without knowing more, the defendant had standing, and the government didn\u2019t challenge standing. Without a government challenge, possession is enough. United States v. Angulo-Fernandez<\/a>, 53 F.3d 1177 (10th Cir. 1995). Impounding defendant\u2019s car and inventorying it because of a Mexican driver\u2019s license was unreasonable. United States v. Garcia-Medina, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80620 (D. Utah June 8, 2012):<\/p>\n

But Trooper Sheets had no legitimate basis for concluding that the Mexican license was invalid and so he had no basis for impounding the car. He was not an expert on Mexican driver’s licenses. He had approximately two days of training on the validity of driver’s licenses in general, and that training focused on licenses issued by states in the United States of America with a smattering amount of information on Canadian and Mexican licenses. He also admitted that he had no way of knowing whether states within Mexico vary in their rules about glowing holograms on licenses. Apart from the black light test (and the record is not clear whether the test was conducted before or after the search), Trooper Sheets did not articulate a specific reason why he believed the license was counterfeit. After he determined that the license plate, insurance, and registration were valid, he had no legitimate basis to detain Mr. Garcia-Medina or impound the car, much less to search the car. The Government does not cite to any law in Utah that prohibits a person from driving a car in the State of Utah with only a valid Mexican driver’s license.<\/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-7627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7627","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=7627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}