Analysis: The rights of auto passengers
on Jun 18, 2007 at 11:53 am
Analysis
Applying a considerable dose of common sense, aligning itself with the overwhelming majority of lower courts, and voting unanimously, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a police traffic stop of a car also amounts to at least temporary detention of everyone in the vehicle, so passengers, as well as the driver, may challenge the legality of the stop. The Court resolved the issue, overturning the California Supreme Court, in a crisp 13-page opinion written by Justice David H. Souter. The opinion read as if the answer were a foregone conclusion. The case was Brendlin v. California (06-8120), which the Court had heard on April 23.
“A traffic stop,” Souter wrote, “necessarily curtails the travel a passenger has chosen just as much as it halts the driver, diverting both from the stream of traffic to the side of the road, and the police activity that normally amounts to intrusion on ‘privacy and personal security’ does not normally (and did not here) distinguish between passenger and driver…An officer who orders one particular car to pull over acts with an implicit claim of right based on fault of some sort, and a sensible person would not expect a police officer to allow people to come and go freely from the physical focal point of an investigation into faulty behavior or wrongdoing.”
It is also reasonable, the opinion added, “for passengers to expect that a police officer at the scene of a crime, arrest, or investigation will not let people move around in ways that could jeopardize his safety.”
While Souter said the Court was in fact deciding the Fourth Amendment “seizure” question for the first time as it applied to passengers in a stopped vehicle, he added: “We have said over and over in dicta that during a traffic stop an officer seizes everyone in the vehicle, not just the driver.”
“Our conclusion,” the Justice wrote, “comports with the views of all nine Federal Courts of Appeals, and nearly every state court, to have ruled on the question.” Only two state supreme courts have agreed with California’s court that passengers are not “seized” for Fourth Amendment purposes when a traffic stop is made.
The appeal in the case was by a California man, Bruce Edward Brendlin. His case has proceeded in the state courts on the premise that the traffic stop in the case was invalid, because it turned out that there was no “probable cause” for the police to have stopped the car in which Brendlin was a front-seat passenger. The focus has been on whether the legality of the stop, given the lack of a legitimate police reason for pulling over the car, could be raised by a passenger, not the driver.
A sheriff’s deputy in Sutter County, Calif., in November 2001 spotted a car with expired registration tags. The car did display a temporary operating permit in the rear window, but the officer nevertheless believed that the car could not be operated on expired tags based on the temporary permit. He thus pulled the car over.
Brendlin identified himself to the officer, and the officer appeared to have recognized him; the officer knew that either Brendlin or his brotg=her was a parole violator. He contacted his dispatcher, and learned that it was this Brendlin who was a parolee at large. The officer ordered the passenger out of the car at gunpoint, and arrested him. In a search of the stopped car “incident to” that arrest, the officer turned up an orange syringe cap and items related to drug manufacturing. Brendlin was charged with various narcotics offenses, and he moved to suppress the evidence, claiming it had resulted from the unlawful stop of the car and his “seizure.”
The trial court denied the suppression motion, concluding that, as a passenger, Brendlin had not been seized for Fourth Amendment purposes. Brendlin then pleaded guilty, subject to appealing on the suppression issue. A divided California Supreme Court ultimately agreed with that conclusion.
In vacating that decision Monday, the Supreme Court did not mandate a reversal of Brendlin’s guilty plea. “It will be for the state courts to consider in the first instance whether suppression turns on any other issue,” Souter wrote.
The decision laid down this test for whether a traffic stop has led to a “seizure” of any passenger in the vehicle: “whether a reasonable person [riding as a passenger in a stopped car] would have believed himself free to terminate the encounter between the police and himself….We think that in these circumstances any reasonable passenger would have understood the police officers to be exercising control to the point that no one in the car was free to depart without police permission.”
Souter’s opinion alone spoke for the Court; there were no concurring opinions or separate notations.
