People v. Tolentino
873 N.Y.S.2d 602
N.Y. App. Div.
2009
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THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, Respondent, v JOSE TOLENTINO, Also Known as JOSE R. TOLENTINO, Appellant.

Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, New York

873 N.Y.S.2d 602

Rena K. Uviller, J.

Judgment, Supreme Court, New York County (Rena K. Uviller, J.), rendered September 28, 2005, convicting defendant, upon his plea of guilty, of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle in the first degree, and sentencing him to a term of five years’ probation, unanimously affirmed.

The court properly denied, without granting a hearing, defendant‘s motion to suppress Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records relating to the suspension of his driver‘s license. Defendant moved to suppress these records as fruits of an allegedly unlawful vehicular stop, during which the police obtained defendant‘s pedigree information and thereby obtained his DMV information through a computer check.

Although a defendant need not establish a privacy interest in an alleged fruit of a preexisting violation of his or her Fourth Amendment rights, we agree with those courts (see e.g.

) that have concluded that DMV records are not suppressible fruits. “The . . . identity of a defendant ... is never itself suppressible as a fruit of an unlawful arrest” (
). Thus, “there is no sanction to be applied when an illegal arrest only leads to discovery of [a person‘s] identity and that merely leads to the official file” (
, cert denied
[internal quotation marks omitted]). Furthermore, the DMV records were compiled independently of defendant‘s arrest (see
, cert denied
;
).

We perceive no basis for reducing the sentence. Concur—Gonzalez, J.P., Sweeny, Renwick and Freedman, JJ.