Miles v. State

• Decision Date: 17 October 2007
• Docket Number: No. PD-1047-06.,No. PD-1019-06.,PD-1019-06.,PD-1047-06.
• Citation: 241 S.W.3d 28
• Parties: Lawrence Preston MILES, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

241 S.W.3d 28

Lawrence Preston MILES, Appellant v. The STATE of Texas.

No. PD-1019-06.

No. PD-1047-06.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

October 17, 2007.

Rehearing Denied December 12, 2007.

Keith s. Hampton, Austin, for Appellant.

Bridget Holloway, Asst. D.A., Houston, Matthew Paul, State's Attorney, Austin, for State.

OPINION

COCHRAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which MEYERS, WOMACK, KEASLER, HERVEY and HOLCOMB, JJ., joined.

A tow-truck driver made a citizen's arrest of appellant for DWI after pursuing him through busy Houston streets late one night. Appellant was then charged with DWI and unlawfully carrying a weapon. He filed a motion to suppress under Article 38.23, the Texas exclusionary statute,¹ and claimed that evidence obtained as a result of this citizen's arrest should have been excluded because the tow-truck driver violated traffic laws when he pursued appellant. After the trial court denied the motion to suppress, appellant pleaded guilty and appealed the trial court's suppression ruling. The court of appeals affirmed the trial court's ruling. It concluded that laws regulating the flow of traffic do not fall within the category of "laws" implicated by Article 38.23 because those laws do not exist to regulate the acquisition of evidence to be used in a criminal case.² We granted review,³ and we affirm the court of appeals.

I.

The evidence showed that Edward James, a limousine driver, was stopped at the corner of Westheimer and Loop 610 at 1:45 a.m., waiting for the light to change. Suddenly a purple Corvette ran into the car behind Mr. James, veered toward the curb, and finally "jagged" back to the left hitting the limousine. The Corvette ended up underneath the rear bumper of Mr. James's limousine. Appellant was driving the Corvette.

Mr. James and a couple of his clients, professional football players, got out of the limousine to inspect the damage. The football players said that appellant was drunk, and then they got back into the car. Mr. James asked appellant for his driver's license and proof of insurance. He noticed that appellant had alcohol on his breath, his speech was "blurry," his eyes were "wiggling" and red, his balance was unsteady, and "he was backing up and holding onto his car, propping himself up onto his car." Mr. James concluded that appellant was drunk. Appellant and Mr. James exchanged driver's license information, but appellant never gave Mr. James his insurance documentation. Mr. James asked him to wait until the police arrived, but after waiting for a while, appellant became very nervous. He said, "I'm going to have to go, I've got to go." Appellant got into his car and backed it up, tearing out part of the limousine's back bumper. Mr. James said that appellant ran the red light as he drove west down Westheimer at a high rate of speed.

Meanwhile, several tow-truck drivers had arrived at the accident scene. Joseph Moore was one of them. He noticed that the damage to the three cars wasn't too bad; they could all still be driven. He thought that the parties could resolve the accident without the need for police assistance. But there was a problem because appellant did not have the required insurance information. Appellant "was reluctant to cooperate and he seemed agitated at the fact that the limo driver wanted him to stay until the police arrived[.] [H]e wanted to leave and he seemed really testy about the limo driver pressing him for the information that he needed." Appellant appeared to be under the influence of something. "His speech was slurred. He was fumbling. He was agitated. . . . He didn't seem coordinated." Mr. Moore did not think it was safe for appellant to leave the scene, so he "made the decision based on public safety and his mannerisms that something needed to be done in an effort to try to stop him from harming anyone else or himself." Mr. Moore was especially concerned because he didn't think that appellant "ever looked to find out if any other traffic was coming" when he left the accident scene.

Mr. Moore and about five other wrecker drivers followed appellant in their trucks because they were "really uncomfortable with the fact that he was driving and at that time of night there was a lot of people on the road and [they] felt like he was a danger to himself and other people." They tried to stop him near the corner of Post Oak and Westheimer, but appellant put his Corvette into reverse, backed up, drove partially up on the curb and went around them. He then "whipped" into a parking lot and crossed it at 30 to 40 miles an hour, came back out onto the road, "never hit[] his brakes, almost sideswipe[d] a car and proceed[ed] westbound on Westheimer."

Mr. Moore followed as appellant took two left turns and went the wrong way down West Alabama into oncoming traffic. His driving was "[v]ery dangerous," so Mr. Moore followed with his "overhead lights on to alert people that we are coming the wrong way." Mr. Moore knew that he was taking a chance going down a one-way street, but "[m]y motive is public safety." Then appellant drove west in the east-bound lanes head-on into heavy traffic on Westheimer, so Mr. Moore crossed over the median and followed, going the right way. Appellant "whip[ped]" into a bar parking lot going "maybe 50 m.p.h." Mr. Moore followed, along with other wrecker drivers who had caught up. They "corralled" appellant in the parking lot. Mr. Moore got out and went up to appellant's Corvette, asked him to put the car in park and give up the keys. When appellant told him "to `F' off," Mr. Moore reached in to take the keys "at which point I felt a cold object to the right temple of my head." It was a handgun. Mr. Moore slid down beside appellant's car and sidled to the rear of the car until the police arrived two or three minutes later.

At the motion to suppress hearing, the trial judge asked appellant to specify his legal issue,⁴ and defense counsel stated,

The sole argument . . . is whether the citizen who placed Mr. Miles under arrest had probable cause to do so, number one. Whether it violated a law in order to arrest Mr. Miles. Number three, whether a citizen has a right to pursue a person if the citizen believes that that person committed a breach of the peace.

After the trial judge denied the motion, appellant pled guilty and appealed those legal issues.

The court of appeals determined that Mr. Moore did make a citizen's arrest, but that the trial judge did not abuse his discretion in concluding that Mr. Moore had probable cause to arrest appellant for driving while intoxicated.⁵ Finally, the court of appeals disagreed with appellant's assertion that Article 38.23 compelled the exclusion of any evidence resulting from appellant's arrest because Mr. Moore violated various traffic laws in effecting the arrest. It noted that a violation of law does not always invoke the provisions of Article 38.23 because the primary purpose of that statute "is to deter unlawful actions that violate the rights of criminal suspects."⁶ Thus, the "`law which is violated in obtaining evidence must exist for the purpose of regulating the acquisition of evidence to be used in a criminal case.'"⁷ Noting that the laws regulating the flow of traffic do not fall into that category, the court then held that Mr. Moore's actions, though perhaps dangerous, did not implicate Article 38.23.⁸

II.

Article 38.23(a), the Texas exclusionary statute, states,

No evidence obtained by an officer or other person in violation of any provisions of the Constitution or laws of the State of Texas, or of the Constitution or laws of the United States of America, shall be admitted in evidence against the accused on the trial of any criminal case.⁹

In this case, we must address two specific portions of Article 38.23:(1) whether an "other person" may make a citizen's arrest for the misdemeanor offense of DWI, and (2) whether the statute bars evidence obtained by an "other person" if that person violates traffic "laws of the State of Texas" in the process of making a citizen's arrest.

The plain language of Article 38.23, like that of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, appears to be relatively straightforward. But, like the Fourth Amendment, its meaning and application are not always so simple. Scores of Supreme Court decisions have explained the contours of constitutional search-and-seizure law and the exclusionary rule that enforces its prohibitions. Thousands of federal and state cases have done the same. A six-volume treatise on the Fourth Amendment expands each year as courts and commentators continue to construe the purportedly plain-language meaning of this short constitutional provision.¹⁰ Although the Texas exclusionary statute has not received anywhere near the judicial or academic attention that the Fourth Amendment has attracted, it, too, is considerably more complex in application than its simple words suggest.¹¹

In many respects, the Texas exclusionary rule mirrors the federal one. But Article 38.23(a), unlike the Fourth Amendment, applies to certain actions by private individuals as well as those by government officers. To understand which actions and why, we examine the historical context in which Article 38.23 was enacted.

A. The History of the Texas Exclusionary Statute.

In 1922, the Court of Criminal Appeals decided Welchek v. State.¹² In that Prohibition-era case, a sheriff and "a number of other gentlemen" had "been waiting and looking for" the defendant to drive down the road. When they saw him approach, they stopped his car and seized three one-gallon jugs of whiskey from it even though they did not have a warrant.¹³ This confiscation was, according to the Court, a common scenario and the "question of search and seizure is now being raised in nearly all liquor cases tried in this State[.]"¹⁴ The Court rejected the argument that the search-and-seizure provision of the Texas Constitution contained an implicit...