An Arrest Warrant Does Not Normally Cure a Bad Stop
by: Jonah Morningstar • September 11, 2011 • no comments
Yesterday, Ryan Scott wrote an excellent post encouraging defense attorneys to keep raising the issue of whether the existence of a valid arrest warrant cures a bad stop. I would second Ryan's encouragement, and in that spirit, here is a more specific argument on the issue that can easily be inserted into a motion to suppress.
Facts that would make your argument stronger are that the officer didn't already know your client's name (i.e. the cop learned the defendant's name as a result of the illegal stop) and that there was no other valid reason to stop the defendant at the time that the defendant was seized. It is also helpful if there was an order or request from the officer to the defendant to come talk to the officer and a request for the defendant's name/date of birth or ID to run a warrants check. See State v. Crandall, 197 Or App 591, 595 (2005) (a stop occurs if an individual is "forced to alter his course of conduct or is summoned away from a task."); see also State v. Rider, 216 Or App 308, 313 (2007) (running a warrants check seizes an individual).
In State v. Starr, 91 Or App 267 (1988), the Court of Appeals ruled that the defendant's identity should be suppressed when he was asked for his ID without reasonable suspicion and was subsequently arrested for driving while suspended. Your argument is that in your client's case, as in Starr, the outstanding warrant should never have been executed, the conversation in which defendant made incriminating statements should never have occurred, and the incriminating evidence on defendant's person or in his vehicle should never have been found, because defendant's identity needs to be suppressed to put him back in the position he would have been in without any illegal police conduct. See State v. Hall, 339 Or 7, 24 (2005) ("[I]n deciding the applicability of the Oregon exclusionary rule, the critical inquiry is whether the state obtained the evidence sought to be suppressed as a result of a violation of the defendant's rights under Article I, section 9.").
In opposing your motion to suppress, the state will probably rely on a pre-Hall line of cases that began in the 1960s with State v. Dempster, 248 Or 404 (1967). In Dempster an officer first recognized a defendant from prior interactions, and then the officer illegally stopped the defendant, discovered an outstanding warrant, and arrested him. The court ruled that the discovery of the outstanding warrant made the arrest on that warrant valid.
The first point to raise about Dempster is that is easily distinguishable from most cases of this type because the officer in that case already knew/recognized the defendant so the officer's knowledge of the defendant's identity was not the product of the unlawful stop. This matters because the Dempster Court reasoned that the discovery of the valid arrest warrant meant that the officer did not trade on the illegally obtained knowledge of the outstanding warrant-but under the more modern Hall exploitation analysis, the reason that the evidence in Dempster was valid is that the discovery of the arrest warrant was not causally related to the illegal stop. That is, the officer in Dempster (who already recognized the defendant on sight) had all the information he needed to discover the outstanding arrest warrant without illegally seizing the defendant. Put another way, the discovery of the illegal warrant was causally related to the officer randomly seeing the defendant in public and recognizing him, and was not causally related to the officer illegally seizing the defendant.
Thus, the dicta in Dempster saying that the taint of the illegal stop doesn't matter if an arrest warrant is discovered because of attenuation was wrong under the Hall paradigm, where suppression is required to vindicate a defendant's constitutional right to be free from illegal seizures. Illegal police conduct that is causally related to the discovery of a defendant's actual identity results in evidence obtained in violation of a defendant's right to be free from illegal seizures, and in your case there probably was no way for the officer to learn about defendant's outstanding arrest warrant without first learning defendant's identity. It is true that the Court of Appeals in State v. Snyder, 72 Or App 359 (1985) adopted the Dempster dicta as essential to the holding, because in Snyder the police used the illegal stop to discover the defendant's identity. However, Dempster conflicts with the Supreme Court's decision in Hall. Thus, the dicta from the Supreme Court's decision in Dempster (and the line of Court of Appeals cases that followed the Dempster dicta including Snyder) was implicitly overruled by Hall.
As recently as 2009, in State v. Backstrand, 231 Or App 621, 637 (2009), the Court of Appeals has cited Starr as viable precedent. In doing so, the Court reiterated the rule that the discovery of an individual's identity is subject to suppression just like anything else that the police discover as a result of their unconstitutional conduct. Put simply, Article I, secition 9 of the Oregon constitution requires that defendant be placed in the same position he would have been in without the illegal police conduct.
One final note: The state likes to argue that the mandatory nature of an arrest warrant (i.e. that it commands an officer to arrest the named individual) somehow purges the taint of the illegal discovery of the arrest warrant. This argument conflates two very distinct issues. Yes, as a practical matter, a police officer might be "required" to execute an arrest warrant even if he or she discovered the arrest warrant illegally. However, even if the police officer is required to arrest the defendant on the warrant once he or she discovers it, that doesn't mean the state gets to use the evidence they find on him while they were in the process of arresting him, because all of that evidence found on his person/car was still the unattenuated product of illegal police conduct.
If anyone has any questions about or suggested improvements for this argument please feel free to contact me by phone or email.
Jonah Morningstar is an attorney with the Office of Appellate Defense Services. The opinions expressed in this article are his alone and not the official position of OPDS.
