Oregon Supreme Ct. - Nov. 6, 2014
by: Frangieringer and Abassos • November 6, 2014 • no comments
Search & Seizure – A Valid Warrant Does Not Remove The Taint of A Bad Stop
Under the federal exclusionary rule, to determine whether the discovery of a valid warrant attenuates police misconduct from challenged evidence, a court must look to 1) “the amount of time that elapsed between the unlawful police conduct and the discovery of the challenged evidence”; 2) “the existence of intervening circumstances”; and 3) “the purpose and flagrancy of the unlawful police conduct.” This analysis overruled Dempster, which held that a valid arrest warrant purged the taint of a bad stop, by finding that under Dempster officers had an incentive to ignore a person’s 4th Amendment rights.
Here, defendant was a passenger in a car who refused to provide officers with his name while another officer was running the name and insurance information of the driver. The officer detained defendant for 25 minutes over the time needed to complete the insurance record’s check in order to wait for an additional officer who could identify defendant. When that officer arrived, he identified defendant and a records check revealed an outstanding arrest warrant. Cocaine was found in a subsequent search incident to arrest.
Under the three part analysis, the cocaine should have been suppressed. The cocaine was discovered following an unlawful detention “that persisted until shortly before the discovery of the challenged evidence.” This made it less likely that there was a break in the causal chain between the unlawful police conduct and the discovery of evidence. Second, the mitigating weight of discovering the arrest warrant was limited by the investigatory purpose of the unlawful detention, and “should not be overemphasized to the ultimate detriment to the goal of deterr[ing]” police misconduct. Third, the violation was flagrant because the officers should have known that extending the detention 30 minutes after “lawful justification of the traffic stop . . . ended” would negatively impact “defendant’s right to be free from unreasonable seizure.” Taking all of these factors into consideration, deterring police misconduct outweighs any value given to the discovery of the valid arrest warrant. Thus, the evidence should have been suppressed as fruits of an illegal search. State v. Bailey, 356 Or 486 (2014).
