State v. Zin Min AungState v. Zin Min Aung
Defendant challenges his conviction for unlawful possession of a controlled substance,
We review the trial court’s denial of defendant’s suppression motion for errors of law. State v. Ehly,
Officer Haugen stopped defendant for failure to obey a traffic control device and an unsignaled lane change. Defendant presented Haugen with his driver’s license. Haugen radioed for a cover officer as he returned to his patrol car. Haugen conducted a records check, which came back “clear and valid.” He then decided to issue a citation to defendant for an unsignaled lane change. After Haugen began writing the citation, Officer Corning arrived, and Haugen asked him to complete the citation. Corning took over processing the citation, and Haugen approached defendant and asked him to get out of the car. Haugen then asked for and received defendant’s consent to pat him down for weapons. Haugen’s pat-down did not produce any weapons, but he then asked defendant if he could search his car. Defendant consented, and the search revealed two Oxycodone pills. Defendant admitted to illegally possessing the Oxycodone, and he was ultimately charged with unlawful possession of a controlled substance.
Defendant appeals the resulting judgment, reprising his argument from below. He asserts that Haugen, by asking Corning to finish the citation, unlawfully extended the duration of the stop “because physically exchanging the citation delayed the completion of the citation.” Defendant recognizes that the exchange between Haugen and Corning “may have added only a few seconds to the duration of the stop” but asserts that State v. Dennis,
The state counters that Dennis does not control and that the officers did not unlawfully extend the stop in this case. The state proposes that the proper inquiry is whether the officers were “expeditiously proceeding with the steps necessary to complete the stop,” not whether the stop was completed in the most expeditious time humanly possible. The state contends that the officers expeditiously moved the investigation and citation process along, such that the traffic stop was not unlawfully extended. The state distinguishes Dennis, complaining that that case occurred in a different context — where an officer inquired about a criminal matter unrelated to the traffic stop instead of proceeding with the steps necessary to complete the stop — whereas here, Haugen’s inquiry occurred while Corning was expeditiously completing the citation.
We begin with the general framework that governs whether a traffic stop is unlawfully extended:
“[A]¡though an officer is free to question a motorist about matters unrelated to the traffic infraction during an unavoidable lull in the investigation, such as while awaiting the results of a records check, that officer is not similarly free to question the motorist about unrelated matters as an alternative to going forward with the next step in processing the infraction, such as the writing or issuing of a citation. When an officer has all of the information necessary to issue a citation but instead delays in processing it or in telling the motorist that he or she is free to go, the stop is no longer lawful unless the officer has reasonable suspicion of further criminal activity.”
State v. Rodgers,
Our decision in Dennis was a relatively straightforward application of that framework in the context of whether an officer questioned a motorist about unrelated matters instead of going forward with processing the traffic citation. In Dennis, a police officer stopped the defendant for jaywalking.
On appeal, first, we explained that an officer can question a motorist about unrelated matters during an unavoidable lull in the stop, but is not similarly free to question a motorist about unrelated matters as an alternative to going forward with the next step in processing the infraction. Id. at 737. We also noted that the state had the burden to prove that a request unrelated to the reason for the stop — in Dennis, the request to open the container — occurred during an unavoidable lull. Id. Given that framework, we concluded that the state had failed to prove that the officer’s request to open the container occurred during an unavoidable lull. Id. at 738. Dispatch had taken 30 seconds to respond to the officer’s inquiry, and the officer could not remember if his request for consent had occurred before or after that 30 second “unavoidable lull.” Accordingly, we concluded that there was no evidence from which the trial court could find that the request occurred before dispatch had responded; therefore, the state had failed to carry its burden to prove that the unrelated inquiry had occurred during an unavoidable lull. Id. In doing so, we rejected the state’s argument that the stop was not extended “in a constitutionally significant way” because we concluded that unrelated inquiries, “no matter how long,” that occur outside of the unavoidable lull unlawfully extend the stop. Id. at 740.
Defendant asserts that Dennis stands for the proposition that any “unjustified” act of an officer that extends the duration of a traffic stop for any amount of time is an unlawful seizure under Article I, section 9. We disagree. In Dennis, we simply held that a traffic stop is unlawfully extended if an officer inquires into matters unrelated to the stop outside of an “unavoidable lull” — no matter how long the unrelated inquiry takes. The Article I, section 9, problem that we identified in Dennis was that the officer began making unrelated inquiries instead of processing the traffic citation. In short, Dennis stands for the unremarkable proposition that an officer unlawfully extends a traffic stop if the officer ceases to process the citation and instead, without justification, begins making inquiries unrelated to the traffic stop. It does not support defendant’s assertion that Article I, section 9, is implicated every time there is a delay in an officer’s processing of a traffic stop.
Moreover, State v. Nims,
We reversed, noting that whether an officer unlawfully extends a stop depends on whether the officer makes the unrelated inquiry instead of expeditiously proceeding with the steps necessary to complete the stop. Id. at 713. In Nims, we
Here, Haugen did not question defendant about matters unrelated to the traffic stop “as an alternative” to processing the traffic citation. There is no dispute that Haugen properly stopped defendant for a traffic violation and then proceeded with standard procedure — he obtained defendant’s identification and returned to his patrol car to run a “records check.” When the check came back “clear” he began to write a citation for the traffic violation. As the trial court found, Corning arrived before Haugen finished writing the citation, and Haugen asked Corning to finish the citation while he spoke to defendant. Corning, without delay, continued writing the citation, and, before he completed it, Haugen had performed the consent search that led to the discovery of the Oxycodone. Therefore, defendant consented to the search of his car while the officers were expeditiously conducting the traffic stop. The trial court correctly denied defendant’s motion to suppress.
Affirmed.
Notes
Defendant was convicted under former ORS 475.840 (3)(b) (2011), renumbered as ORS 475.752(3)(b) (2013).