¶ 2. Shortly before midnight on January 31,2008, a state trooper in a police car with a narcotics identification dog in it observed defendant’s vehicle make a left turn onto Charles Avenue in Middlebury. Defendant soon approached a stop sign, stopped completely, and then put on her right turn signal and made the turn. The state trooper followed and watched defendant as she approached a second stop sign. Again, defendant put on her turn signal only after coming to a complete stop. After making a left turn, defendant continued her drive through the town, and eventually approached a third stop sign. As before, defendant did not indicate her intention to turn until after arriving at a complete stop. At that point, the state trooper pulled defendant over for violating 23 V.S.A. § 1064(d), which requires drivers to continuously signal their intention to turn for at least one hundred feet prior to turning.
¶ 3. The officer approached defendant’s car and asked for her driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance. Defendant told him that she did not have any of the requested items. He then asked for her name. Defendant gave the officer a false name, which the trooper did not know was false but recognized as belonging to a person who had been involved in drug activity based on information he had received in the past. The officer contacted one of his colleagues who confirmed the state police had received information that a person by that name had been involved with narcotics.
¶ 4. The state trooper also testified that during the stop he observed defendant pushing a purse under the car seat with her legs and acting quite nervously. The officer suggested that she check the purse to see if her license was in it. Defendant declined and stated that the purse did not contain the license. Defendant continued to cast nervous glances toward the purse throughout the encounter, behavior that the state trooper believed was an indication that the purse contained contraband.
¶ 5. At that point in the traffic stop, the officer informed defendant that he had a narcotics canine in his cruiser and that he would be doing an “exterior sniff” of the car. He released the dog, which alerted on the driver’s side rear door. The total amount of time that passed between the traffic stop and the exterior sniff was less than five minutes, according to the officer. The officer then read defendant the probable cause consent form, and defendant agreed to allow a wan-antless search of her person and her vehicle. Defendant signed the consent form, again using the false name. The state trooper searched the purse and vehicle and found drug paraphernalia, some containing heroin residue, and defendant’s operator’s license indicating her proper name.
¶ 6. Defendant was charged in Addison District Court with three misdemeanors: one count of possession of less than two hundred milligrams of heroin, one count of driving with a suspended license, and one count of providing false information to a
¶ 7. Defendant later filed a second motion to suppress and dismiss, expanding upon her earlier arguments by maintaining that the traffic stop was pretextual because full technical compliance with the statute could not be expected from all drivers. Furthermore, defendant argued that the officer did not take any steps to investigate the alleged traffic violation, but instead immediately turned the traffic stop into a drug investigation without a proper basis for doing so. On August 26, 2008, the district court denied this second motion, finding “nothing inappropriate about [the officer’s] behavior whatsoever.” Defendant then entered a conditional guilty plea agreement with the State. The Notice of Plea Agreement preserved the “suppression issue” for appeal to this Court.
¶ 8. In reviewing a denial of a motion to suppress, we apply a deferential standard of review to the trial court’s findings of fact, and we review the court’s legal eon
elusions de novo.
State v. Bain,
¶ 9. Defendant’s first argument on appeal is that the state trooper did not have reasonable grounds to stop her for violating § 1064(d). Under both the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article Eleven of the Vermont Constitution, a law enforcement officer must have a reasonable and articulable suspicion of wrongdoing before making a traffic stop.
State v. Lussier,
¶ 10. Defendant contends that her behavior did not violate § 1064(d) and that the officer therefore did not have sufficient justification to make the traffic stop. Our starting point in interpreting a statute is to give effect to legislative intent.
Payne v. U.S. Airways, Inc.,
¶ 11. Section 1064(d) provides that “[a] signal of intention to turn right or left when required shall be given continuously during not less than the last 100 feet traveled by the vehicle before turning.” Defendant contends that the words “when required” suggest that use of the turn signal is not mandatory in all instances, but rather only when traffic conditions are such that use of the signal is appropriate. We disagree. The plain, ordinary meaning of the statutory language indicates that the operator of a motor vehicle must indicate an intention to turn within one hundred feet of turning regardless of traffic conditions. The “when required” proviso, by its placement in the sentence, refers to the requirement to use the signal at the intersection. That requirement is contained in § 1064(a) (“Before changing direction ..., a driver shall give warning of his or her intention with the hand signals as provided in section 1065 of this title, or with a mechanical or lighting device approved by the commissioner of motor vehicles.”) and § 1065(b) (“No turn to right or left may be made without first giving a signal of an intention to do so either by hand or by signal in accordance with section 1064 of this title.”). These sections required defendant to signal for each of the turns she made; § 1064(d) required that signal to commence at least one hundred feet before the intersection. Thus, in reading the
various sections of the statutory scheme together, as we must, see
McAlister v. Vt. Prop. & Cas. Ins. Guar. Ass’n,
¶ 12. Our interpretation of § 1064(d) is supported by the decisions of courts from other jurisdictions that have interpreted similar statutes. See, e.g.,
State v. Lowman,
¶ 13. Given our interpretation of the statute, the facts indicate that defendant’s conduct violated § 1064(d) on three occasions. Therefore, the state trooper who observed defendant’s conduct had the necessary reasonable and articulable suspicion of wrongdoing required to make the traffic stop.
¶ 14. Next, defendant argues that the state trooper did not have the reasonable and articulable suspicion necessary to expand the traffic stop into a drug investigation. We conclude that this argument was not preserved for appeal, and we decline to address it.
¶ 15. Defendant entered into a plea agreement with the State, conditioned on resolution of the “suppression issue” by
¶ 16. Federal courts, in applying Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(a)(2), have required that defendants clearly specify the issues they wish to preserve when entering a conditional guilty plea. For instance, in
United States v. Coffin,
the court noted that under the federal rule, in a conditional plea, “[t]he issues preserved for appeal must be framed with precision and stated with specificity.”
¶ 17. In this case, defendant made two motions to suppress. The first was directed entirely at the proper interpreta
tion of the statute — the argument resolved above — and the trial court denied that motion. Thereafter, defendant renewed the motion to suppress, stating, “[defendant] moves to suppress evidence obtained as a result of a pretextual and therefore unlawful traffic stop and subsequent drug investigation.” In that renewed motion, defendant argued that the stop was pretextual because “full technical compliance with the statute cannot be expected from all drivers.” Defendant added, however, that the officer did not investigate the infraction but “turned this traffic stop into a drug investigation without any proper basis for doing so,” in violation of the Vermont Constitution as interpreted by this Court in
State v. Cunningham,
¶ 18. Defendant signed a conditional plea agreement, pleading guilty, subject to “appeal of suppression issue” to this Court. Defendant filed an appeal “of the ruling denying her motion to suppress evidence obtained as a result of an illegal search and seizure.” The notice of appeal contains the exact wording of defendant’s first motion, but not the wording of the second motion.
¶ 19. In her brief on appeal, defendant has raised and briefed the issue of whether the officer had grounds to pursue a drag investigation, relying upon
Cunningham,
the only dog sniff narcotics case this Court has decided.
¶ 20. We hold, therefore, that defendant failed to comply with Vermont Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(a)(2) by not specifically describing the issue with respect to the drug investigation in the condi tional plea agreement. Having failed to do so, defendant cannot raise the issue here.
¶ 21. Although we are compelled to uphold the application of § 1064(d) in this case, we agree with defendant that the statute goes well beyond the safety concerns that it purports to implement and is constantly violated, even by safety-conscious drivers. It is difficult to see why other users of the road need a motorist approaching an intersection marked by a stop sign or signal to indicate his or her intention to turn well in advance of actually making the turn. Indeed, for no apparent reason, the statute prohibits a motorist from approaching an intersection and determining at the intersection — after stopping at a sign or signal as required — his or her future direction. As a consequence, when a motorist is not familiar with his or her surroundings, the motorist often must violate the law to determine his or her desired direction. In effect, the statute precludes a motorist from turning at any intersection without knowing well in advance the direction he or she will go. We therefore urge the Legislature to reexamine the statute and narrow its operation within more reasonable limits.
Affirmed.
Notes
The court did not address defendant’s second contention, later noting that it saw no second issue raised in the motion at all.
After asking the officer about defendant’s actions in trying to hide her purse, the prosecutor paused and said “given what the argument is and the motion to suppress,” he did not feel the need to go further, but would do so if the court wanted to hear more. The court asked defense counsel whether she was “challenging anything beyond this point.” Defense counsel answered “I’d certainly like to hear what the officer has to say ... I want to know about how the dog got there.” At that point, the prosecutor asked about how the officer learned that the name given by defendant matched a person who was reported to be involved with drug activity in the past. Defense counsel did not cross-examine with respect to the additional information or make any argument other than that the stop was improper. Defense counsel never answered the question asked by the judge.