City of Minnetonka v. Shepherd

• Citation: 420 N.W.2d 887
• Decision Date: 25 March 1988
• Docket Number: No. C8-87-1694,C8-87-1694
• Parties: CITY OF MINNETONKA, Appellant, v. Paul Cummings SHEPHERD, Respondent.
• Court: Minnesota Supreme Court

Page 887

420 N.W.2d 887

CITY OF MINNETONKA, Appellant, v. Paul Cummings SHEPHERD, Respondent.

No. C8-87-1694.

Supreme Court of Minnesota.

March 25, 1988.

Syllabus by the Court

Police officer properly stopped motor vehicle in reliance on telephone tip from person who identified himself as attendant at nearby gas station and said that driver of vehicle in question had just been in station and was intoxicated.

Patrick W. Ledray, Laurel M. Hersey, City of Minnetonka, Minnetonka, for appellant.

Robert H. Lynn, Minneapolis, for respondent.

Considered and decided by the court en banc without oral argument.

AMDAHL, Chief Justice.

We granted the petition of the state to review the unpublished decision of the court of appeals which affirmed the trial court's suppression of chemical test results in the prosecution of defendant Paul Cummings Shepherd for DWI. Agreeing with the trial court, the court of appeals held that the stop which led to defendant's arrest and to the taking of the chemical test was illegal because it was based on an unreliable telephone tip from an informant. Holding that the tip was sufficiently reliable to justify the stop, we reverse the court of appeals and remand for trial.

Minutes before midnight on Friday, February 20, 1987, the dispatcher for the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office received a telephone call from a person identifying himself as an attendant at the Q Petroleum Station in Minnetonka, which is at Highway 7 and Williston Road. The informant reported to the dispatcher that he had observed an intoxicated driver leave the gas station heading north on Williston Road in a white Honda with Minnesota license plate No. NKD 098. Officer Lowell Reed Ballard of the Minnetonka Police Department received this information from the dispatcher at 11:59 p.m.

Two to three minutes later Officer Ballard saw and began following the car in question as it headed west on Highwood Drive, a residential street in Minnetonka that is west of Williston Road and north of and running parallel to Highway 7. The car was going "probably" 35 miles per hour, but the officer was not sure of this. The car turned onto Oxford Place and was momentarily out of the officer's view. Once the officer made the turn onto Oxford he saw the car stopped "almost in the center" of the road, which has no center line, approximately 50 feet from the next intersection, with Canterbury Drive. The car was stopped, with its brake lights on, for just a brief period--the trial court found "two to four seconds." Traffic on Oxford is warned to yield to traffic on Canterbury Drive, but there was no reason apparent to the officer for the driver to have stopped, there being no traffic or other cars in the vicinity. When the officer's car pulled close to the car, the driver began driving forward slowly, turning left onto Canterbury Drive. It was at that point that the officer activated his car's red lights and stopped the other car.

The driver was defendant, age 29, who lived just a couple houses down on Canterbury Drive. As soon as the officer saw him and talked with him, it was obvious to the officer that defendant was intoxicated. Defendant subsequently failed the field sobriety tests, failed the preliminary breath test, and failed the Intoxilyzer-brand chemical breath test (his lower reading was .19).

Defendant testified at the omnibus hearing that he did not think he stopped on Oxford, but he admitted he may have. He explained that, whether he stopped or simply slowed down, the reason he did so was that he was familiar with the intersection and knew that extra caution was required.

Suppressing the test results and all the other evidence obtained as a result of the arrest in the misdemeanor criminal prosecution that resulted, the trial court reasoned that suppression was required by Olson v. Commissioner of Public Safety, 371 N.W.2d 552 (Minn.1985). The court of appeals agreed with the trial court. It also said that "At another time, another trial court, viewing substantially the same fact situation, might have gone a different way. But, as a court of review, we will not substitute our judgment on conflicting oral testimony for that of a trial court."

This is a puzzling statement because there really was no significant conflict in the evidence. The only conflict related to whether or not defendant stopped on Oxford. The trial court ruled that defendant did stop. In our opinion, the issue in this case is a purely legal issue on the basis of the facts as found. We believe that both the trial court and the court of appeals erred in concluding that the Olson case requires suppression.

Three of our cases are particularly relevant to this case:

(a) The first, chronologically, is Marben v. State, Department of Public Safety, 294 N.W.2d 697 (Minn.1980). In that case a state trooper, parked on I-94 near an exit in Stearns County at 7:30 p.m. on a June night, received a CB radio report from an unidentified man who said he was a trucker and that he could see the trooper's car. The caller said that a motorist had been tailgating him for 60 to 70 miles and was exiting onto Highway 23. The trucker apparently continued on his way on I-94. The trooper saw the car as it exited and stopped it moments later without having seen any improper driving. The driver, Marben, was under the influence of alcohol. We held that there was no problem with the caller's basis of knowledge. We also reasoned that the trucker could be believed because he apparently was a so-called private citizen informer and because "due to the trucker's reference to the location of * * * [the trooper's] squad car and the vehicle in question, the trooper was able to verify that the trucker was in the area, and in close proximity to the subject car." 294 N.W.2d at 699.

(b) In Olson v. Commissioner of Public Safety, 371 N.W.2d 552 (Minn.1985), two sheriff's deputies on patrol in Western Hennepin County at 10:45 p.m. on a February night received a dispatch that an unidentified person had called in and reported "possibly a drunken driver" driving westbound on Highway 55 from County Road 116 in a white Datsun with Minnesota license plate No. EMN 880. The officers spotted the described car going eastbound on Highway 55 and followed it into a bar parking lot, then onto westbound 55. They saw no improper driving before they stopped the car. The driver was...