Sixth Circuit Tosses Evidence After Cop Can’t Find One Credible Reason For Extending A Traffic Stop

This stop may not have been all that pretextual — after all, the officer clocked the driver doing 69 mph in a 55 mph speed limit — but it swiftly turned pretextual for reasons the officer couldn’t competently explain.

And that’s what cost the officer (and the prosecution) their evidence. Back in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that traffic stops end when the objective of the stop has been completed. That means that once a driver has been issued a warning or citation, they’re free to go.

Recognizing this might cramp their preferred pretextual style, officers increased the number of questions they asked of drivers and slow-walked the other steps required to complete a traffic stop. Because nothing makes a pretext more useless than actually having to engage with the stated objective of the traffic stop.

Well, lots of lower courts have already spotted this shift in tactics and responded accordingly. The key point wasn’t “completing” the “objective” of the stop. The real point made by the Rodriguez decision was that cops could no longer extend traffic stops without sufficient reasonable suspicion to do so. And that’s where cops keep tripping over themselves.

In this case, handled by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court, the officer stumbled more than most when defending her unreasonably extended traffic stop in court. Officer Kristen Cox, who was a member of the Knoxville (TN) Police Department’s “drug interdiction team,” pulled over Nathaniel Taylor for speeding on Interstate 275. She asked Taylor for his license, registration, and insurance information. Taylor complied, but had trouble locating his insurance info.

Officer Cox told him to keep looking for his proof of insurance, telling him he could avoid a ticket if he could find it. Then she went back to her car to run his license. When she did, she discovered he had a criminal record.

Then she made her first stab at generating enough reasonable suspicion to extend the stop. And then she immediately undercut her own narrative when testifying in court. From the decision [PDF]:

Back in her patrol car, Officer Cox checked Taylor’s records and discovered that he had a criminal history involving weapons, assaults, and simple possession of drugs. Meanwhile, she also observed him making large reaching movements in his car, which she acknowledged were consistent with rummaging for the proof of insurance that she asked him to look for.

Not a great start. But then it got worse.

Taylor eventually found documentation and flagged down Officer Cox by waving his hand and insurance paper out of the driver’s side window. When Officer Cox returned to Taylor’s vehicle, Taylor handed her an insurance bill, which Officer Cox accepted as sufficient documentation. Officer Cox informed him that she would not ticket him for driving without insurance. She also told Taylor not to make any further movements because he was making her nervous. But Officer Cox also acknowledged that the movements were because “[Taylor] was doing what [she] asked.”

You can’t have it both ways, although many cops believe (and attest) that they should. They should be able to issue conflicting orders and react to partial compliance as a dangerous form of potential violence, rather than just the actions of someone attempting to do the impossible.

The officer returned to her car to write the speeding ticket. But rather than just do that, she also requested a K-9 unit due to the fact that she had observed air fresheners in the car, Taylor’s criminal history, and her disbelief in Taylor’s stated travel plans — plans he had never stated because he was only asked where he was coming from (a job interview at a nearby business according to Taylor) but never asked where he was going. Those aren’t “travel plans” and, as such, cannot legitimately be considered reasonably suspicious.

Nonethless, the drug dog arrived and did the thing, which gave officers permission to perform a warrantless search of Taylor’s car. Despite the dog supposedly “alerting,” no drugs were found. The only thing officers found was a gun that Taylor wasn’t allowed to possess as a convicted felon. A grand jury indicted him and the case went to trial.

The trial court ruled the stop was not unlawfully extended and allowed the results of the search to be admitted as evidence. The Sixth Circuit court, however, restores Taylor’s rights and affirms the findings of the Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision. This stop was unlawfully extended because Officer Cox never had the reasonable suspicion required to take it past the point of its stated objective: the speeding cited when Cox first pulled Taylor over.

First, the court shoots down the officer’s claim about “suspicious” travel plans by pointing out she didn’t have enough information on hand to draw the inferences she stated in support of extending the stop.

Here, after learning that Taylor had just come from a job interview, Officer Cox “didn’t feel like he took the most efficient route to get” to the address on his driver’s license. But Officer Cox never asked Taylor where he was going. In fact, she admitted that she just made a guess about where Taylor was headed.

That Officer Cox felt Taylor had too many air fresheners in his car doesn’t matter either.

Like the value of a defendant’s criminal history, the strong odor of air fresheners during a traffic stop plays more of a supporting role to other, stronger indicators of criminal activity in making the reasonable-suspicion determination. But here, there is no evidence of an odor, rendering the presence of air fresheners even less probative. Officer Cox did not indicate a strong smell of air fresheners, any trace odor of marijuana, or any other suspicious scent in Taylor’s vehicle. Quite the opposite: she said she did not “smell anything.” Rather, she merely observed that Taylor had several air fresheners on his gear shift. So we give little weight to the air fresheners on the gear shift of Taylor’s vehicle.

In totality, it doesn’t add up. Separately, the factors are weak. Combined into a whole — including Officer Cox testifying that movements made by Taylor in response to her direct request for insurance documentation were somehow also suspicious — there’s still not enough to justify extending the stop, much less the search that followed it.

The threshold for reasonable suspicion may be low, but it is not nonexistent. Thus, we hold that Officer Cox lacked a reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity that justified extending Taylor’s stop to conduct a dog sniff.

And there’s no “good faith exception” to save the day. As the Appeals Court points out, “good faith” is an exception that applies to searches predicated on questionable warrants and no warrant was used here.

[We] decline to extend the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule to salvage unconstitutional Terry stops.

The evidence is gone, which means there’s no case and no chance for a conviction. Officer Cox went fishing and managed to land a felon-in-possession. But while lots of courts will go out of their way to ensure law enforcement’s fish don’t get tossed back in the proverbial lake, the Sixth Circuit isn’t willing to play that game — not with these stakes (constitutional rights) and this almost complete lack of suspicion any court (much less cop) should call “reasonable.”