Bodiford v. State, A14A0683.

• Decision Date: 14 July 2014
• Docket Number: No. A14A0683.,A14A0683.
• Citation: 328 Ga.App. 258,761 S.E.2d 818
• Court: Georgia Court of Appeals
• Parties: BODIFORD v. The STATE.

328 Ga.App. 258

761 S.E.2d 818

BODIFORD

v.The STATE.

No. A14A0683.

Court of Appeals of Georgia.

July 14, 2014.

Daniel Forrest Farnsworth, for Appellant.

Blair Douglas Mahaffey, James Luther Wright III, Jordan Kerry Van Matre, for Appellee.

BRANCH, Judge.

Ricardo Breshard Bodiford appeals from an order of the Henry County Superior Court denying his motion to suppress cocaine discovered in his car during a traffic stop. Bodiford asserts that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress because police discovered the cocaine only after the arresting officer impermissibly prolonged the traffic stop for the purpose of conducting a drug investigation, and because the officer lacked a legal basis for expanding the scope of the traffic stop beyond its original purpose. We agree with Bodiford and therefore reverse the trial court's order.

At a hearing on a motion to suppress, the trial judge sits as the trier of fact. Gonzalez v. State, 299 Ga.App. 777, 778(1), 683 S.E.2d 878 (2009). On appeal from the grant or denial of such a motion, therefore, this Court “must construe the evidence most favorably to uphold the findings and judgment of the trial court, and that court's findings as to disputed facts and credibility must be adopted unless clearly erroneous. However, we owe no deference to the trial court's conclusions of law and are instead free to apply anew the legal principles to the facts.” State v. Able, 321 Ga.App. 632–633, 742 S.E.2d 149 (2013) (punctuation and footnote omitted).

The relevant facts in this case are undisputed and the record shows that while patrolling I–75 on the evening of October 30, 2012, Officer Jason Hart of the Henry County Police Department performed a traffic stop of a car being driven by Bodiford after Hart detected the car traveling 10 miles per hour over the posted speed limit. Hart initiated the traffic stop at 6:40 p.m., and a video recording of that stop was introduced into evidence at the hearing on the motion to suppress.¹

Hart testified that when he asked Bodiford for his driver's license, Bodiford appeared visibly nervous; his right hand was shaking, he was breathing heavily, and sweat was beginning to bead on his forehead. The officer therefore asked Bodiford to step out of his vehicle while Hart wrote him a courtesy warning. The video of the stop shows that Hart thereafter retrieved his citation book from his patrol car and then spent approximately two-and-one-half minutes writing Bodiford a warning ticket, conversing with Bodiford as he did so. The video shows that Hart explained the warning to Bodiford, and Bodiford appears to sign the citation. After he completed writing and explaining the warning, however, Hart did not give the ticket to Bodiford or return Bodiford's license. Rather, at that point, approximately six-and-one-half minutes after the traffic stop had begun, Hart questioned Bodiford about the status of his driver's license and told Bodiford the officer would need to run a check of the same. According to Hart, his standard practice was to refrain from running a license check until at or near the time he had completed writing the traffic citation.

The video of the traffic stop shows Hart standing between Bodiford's car and his patrolcar, using his shoulder-mounted radio to provide dispatch with Bodiford's driver's license number. After transmitting the license information to dispatch, Hart asked Bodiford whether he had any contraband in the car, such as drugs, guns, or excessive amounts of cash. When Bodiford responded negatively, Hart asked for permission to search the car. Bodiford questioned Hart as to whether he was required to consent to an automobile search and Hart explained that Bodiford had a constitutional right to refuse, but that if Bodiford refused consent, “what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna get my dog out of the [patrol] car, run my dog around [your] car and see if he shows any positive odor response on the vehicle.” When Bodiford refused to give an unequivocal “yes” to Hart's request for consent to search the car, the officer patted him down, instructed him to stand away from his car and next to Hart's patrol car, and asked for and received permission to turn off Bodiford's car.

After turning off Bodiford's car, and approximately nine minutes into the traffic stop, Hart returned to his patrol car to retrieve his dog. Although Hart cannot be seen on camera at this point, dispatch can be heard very clearly on the radio attempting to contact Hart. Hart, however, did not respond to the dispatcher. At the hearing below, Hart testified that he heard dispatch attempting to reach him, but explained that he did not respond because he was “in [the] process of hooking my lead up to my dog and I didn't want to take my hands off it in order to key up on the radio.” The officer acknowledged, however, that at the time he received the radio call, he had not yet removed his dog from the patrol car. After Hart failed to respond to the radio call, the dispatcher can be heard on the recording making a second attempt to reach the officer. Seven seconds later, as he was standing together with his dog next to Bodiford's car, Hart responded to the radio call, telling the dispatcher, “I'm in a bad spot here.” Hart testified that his response resulted from the fact that radio service on the part of I–75 where the traffic stop was occurring was “very poor” and that “90 percent of the time” officers in that area would need to use the radio in their patrol car to speak with dispatch. Hart further explained that once dispatch was told he was in a bad spot for radio, the dispatcher would know she should make no further attempts to contact him; rather, the dispatcher would wait for Hart to contact her.

Having thus instructed dispatch not to initiate any further contact with him, Hart walked his dog around Bodiford's car. The dog indicated that there was contraband in the car and Hart then searched the vehicle. During that search, the officer found a large quantity of cocaine located underneath a passenger-side seat. Based on this discovery, Hart arrested Bodiford.

Savannah Black was the Henry County dispatcher with whom Hart had contact during the incident in question. She testified that dispatch operators fulfill two general functions with respect to traffic stops. First, dispatchers create a computer-aided dispatch (“CAD”) report for every traffic stop conducted. Second, the operators log all relevant information into those CAD reports as the information is received. Such information would include the make, model, and tag number of the car being stopped and the license information of the driver. According to the CAD report generated in connection with the stop of Bodiford, Black sent Bodiford's driver's license information to the GCIC at 6:46:13 p.m., and the results of that check were transmitted back to her two seconds later, at 6:46:15 p.m.² At 6:48:14 p.m., Black logged that information into the CAD report, and she testified that as a matter of routine practice, her next step would be to communicate the results of the license check to the requesting officer. The record shows that Black's first attempt to contact Hart occurred at 6:48:45 p.m., or approximately 30 seconds after Black logged the information received from GCIC regarding Bodiford's license into the CAD report.

Following his arrest, Bodiford was indicted on a single count of trafficking in cocaine. Prior to trial, he moved to suppress the cocaine found in his car, arguing that it resulted from an illegal detention. After holding an evidentiary hearing on that motion, the trial court denied the same but granted Bodiford a certificate of immediate review. Bodiford then filed an application for an interlocutory appeal, which this Court granted. This appeal followed.

1. On a motion to suppress contraband discovered during a traffic stop, “[t]he State bears the burden of proving that the search of the car was lawful, and to carry this burden, the State must show that it was lawful to detain [Bodiford] until the time the drug dog indicated the presence of drugs.” Dominguez v. State, 310 Ga.App. 370, 372, 714 S.E.2d 25 (2011) (citation omitted). As our Supreme Court has recently explained, claims that an officer illegally prolonged a detention resulting from a traffic stop generally fall into two categories. The first category involves those cases where the officer allegedly extended the stop “beyond the conclusion of the investigation that warranted the detention in the first place,” i.e., whether the officer prolonged the stop after concluding his investigation of the traffic violation. Rodriguez v. State, 295 Ga. 362(2)(b), 761 S.E.2d 19 (2014) (citation omitted). In such cases, courts have “generally concluded” that even a “short prolongation” is “unreasonable unless ... good cause has appeared in the meantime to justify a continuation of the detention to pursue a different investigation.” Id. In the second category of cases, the detention is not extended

beyond the conclusion of the investigation that originally warranted the detention, but it is claimed that the investigation took too long .... In these cases, the courts examine “whether the police diligently pursued a means of investigation that was likely to confirm or dispel their suspicions quickly, during which time it was necessary to detain the defendant. United States v. Sharpe, 470 U.S. 675, 686(II)(B), 105 S.Ct. 1568, 84 L.Ed.2d 605 (1985).”

Id. In either type of case, the touchstone of our analysis is the reasonableness of the investigating officer's conduct, i.e., we ask whether the officer's conduct in prolonging the stop was reasonable given the objective facts known to the officer and the circumstances under which he was working. See Walker v. State, 314 Ga.App. 67, 73(2), 722 S.E.2d 887 (2012); Young v. State, 310 Ga.App. 270, 273, 712 S.E.2d 652 (2011). See also Rodriguez, 295 Ga. at ––––(2)(b), 761 S.E.2d 19 (“ [i]n...