Long Beach, Motion to Suppress Drugs Wins, Case Dismissed

Once they felt something in his pants pocket, they asked him what it was.  It was drug paraphernalia and a bag of methamphetamine weighing ten grams.  He also had about $100 in small bills in his other pocket.  Police then arrested him for possession of a controlled substance for purposes of sales (Health and Safety Code § 11378).

The father of the client came to Greg Hill & Associates and explained the case.  His son was let go by the police and was at work when the father stopped by our office.

 

Greg listened to the father and immediately recognized that the case facts seemed to mimic those of a recently decided U.S. Supreme Court decision that Greg had read and really liked, Rodriguez v. U.S. Supreme Court ((2015) 575 U.S. 348, 135 S. Ct. 1609, 191 L. Ed. 2d 492.  In that decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained that a police detention could be unlawfully prolonged, making any search and seizure thereafter illegal as well.

Greg explained to the client’s father, Justice Ginsburg stated that a routine traffic stop is more like a brief detention to stop and frisk under Terry v. Ohio (1968) 392 U.S. 1, 190, rather than an arrest.  Its tolerable duration is determined by the seizure’s “mission,” which is to address the traffic violation that warranted the stop.  “Authority for the stop ends when tasks tied to the traffic infraction – or reasonably should have been – completed.”  A gratuitous further search (as was sought here) is improper, in other words.  In Rodriguez, the U.S. Supreme Court said the drugs discovered should be suppressed and therefore, the case dismissed.

Greg therefore appeared for the client and filed a motion to suppress.  The motion analogized our client’s bicycle stop to the traffic stop in the Rodriguez case.  Rodriguez was pulled over for veering his vehicle on a Nebraska highway.  The officer prolonged the traffic stop without reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a K-9 sniff search, which led to the arrest of Rodriguez.  The attorney for Rodriguez then moved to suppress the drugs found by the drug dog.  California Penal Code § 1538.5 gives the Court the power to suppress evidence when certain evidence is illegally gathered.  After all, if the detention is illegally prolonged, then the search is illegal, too, and all evidence gathered therefrom must be suppressed as “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Wong Sun v. United States (1963) 371 U.S. 471.