Platt v. State

• Decision Date: 24 March 1992
• Docket Number: No. 92S03-9203-CR-195,92S03-9203-CR-195
• Citation: 589 N.E.2d 222
• Parties: Jimmy Dean PLATT, Appellant (Defendant Below), v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee (Plaintiff Below).
• Court: Indiana Supreme Court

Page 222

589 N.E.2d 222

60 USLW 2667

Jimmy Dean PLATT, Appellant (Defendant Below), v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee (Plaintiff Below).

No. 92S03-9203-CR-195.

Supreme Court of Indiana.

March 24, 1992.

Richard J. Thonert, Romero & Thonert, Fort Wayne, for appellant.

Linley E. Pearson, Atty. Gen., Preston W. Black, Deputy Atty. Gen., Indianapolis, for appellee.

SHEPARD, Chief Justice.

Can flight from a law enforcement officer furnish sufficient ground for a limited investigative stop? We hold that it can. Jimmy Dean Platt was convicted of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, a class A misdemeanor, Ind.Code Sec. 9-11-2-2 (West Supp.1988), and operating a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .10% or more, a class C misdemeanor Ind.Code Sec. 9-11-2-1 (West Supp.1988). ¹ The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the investigative stop of Platt's car was unconstitutional. Platt v. State (1991), Ind.App., 568 N.E.2d 1028. The State seeks transfer.

Facts

At approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, May 7, 1989, Whitley County Sheriff's Deputy Dennis Ruch was on routine patrol in his squad car. As he headed south on State Road 205 between Churubusco and Columbia City, he noticed a vehicle parked on the side of the road, headed in the opposite direction, with someone in the driver's seat. Deputy Ruch continued on a short distance, made a U-turn, then pulled in behind the parked car. The parked car's lights went on, and it immediately sped away, throwing gravel from the roadside berm behind it.

Deputy Ruch activated his lights and followed the vehicle for about one quarter of a mile before it pulled off to the side of the road. Ruch then approached the vehicle on foot, and asked the driver, later identified as Platt, for his license and registration. While waiting for Platt to comply with this request, Ruch detected a strong odor of alcohol. After administering a portable breath test to Platt, Ruch transported Platt to the Whitley County Jail. At the jail, Platt performed field sobriety tests and underwent a breathalyzer test. The breathalyzer test showed that Platt had a BAC of .17%. Platt was then arrested. He signed a waiver of rights and admitted to having consumed alcohol earlier in the evening.

Platt filed a pretrial motion to suppress, claiming that the investigative stop was unconstitutional and seeking to exclude all evidence subsequently gathered. The trial court denied the motion. A jury found Platt guilty on both counts. Platt appealed, and the Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the trial court erred in denying the motion to suppress.

The Court of Appeals concluded that Ruch's initial investigative stop of Platt's car was an unreasonable seizure in violation of the fourth amendment. Because we believe a proper balance is struck under the fourth amendment by allowing police officers to stop temporarily an individual who flees upon seeing police or a squad car, we grant transfer and vacate the decision of the Court of Appeals.

I. "Terry" Stops and the Fourth Amendment

As a general rule, automobile drivers are not shorn of their fourth amendment protections when they leave their homes and enter their automobiles. Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 663, 99 S.Ct. 1391, 1401, 59 L.Ed.2d 660 (1979). However, "there is nothing automatically unconstitutional in subjecting citizens to a brief detention under circumstances where probable cause for a formal arrest is lacking." Luckett v. State (1972), 259 Ind. 174, 179, 284 N.E.2d 738, 741 (emphasis in original).

The so-called "stop and frisk" doctrine announced in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), has allowed courts to gauge the reasonableness of particular investigative stops by striking "a balance between the public interest [behind the investigation] and the individual's right to personal security free from arbitrary interference from law officers." United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 878, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 2579, 45 L.Ed.2d 607 (1975). Where the public interest served by the officer's investigation is great and the intrusion on individual privacy is small, investigative stops of limited duration and "reasonably related in scope to the justification for their initiation" have been upheld. Id. at 881, 95 S.Ct. at 2580 (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 29, 88 S.Ct. at 1884). "To justify a warrantless intrusion, the police officer need not have probable cause to make an arrest, but must 'point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts,' reasonably warrant intrusion upon an individual's right of privacy." Gipson v. State (1984), Ind., 459 N.E.2d 366, 368 (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 22, 88 S.Ct. at 1880). If the facts known by the police at the time of the "stop" are such that a man of reasonable caution would believe that the action taken was appropriate, the command of the fourth amendment is satisfied. Id. at 368.

Of course, the level of suspicion required for a Terry stop is less demanding than probable cause. United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 109 S.Ct. 1581, 104 L.Ed.2d 1 (1989). "The concept of reasonable suspicion, like probable cause, is not 'readily, or even usefully, reduced to a neat set of legal rules.' " Id. at 7, 109 S.Ct. at 1585 (quoting Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 232, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 2329, 76 L.Ed.2d 527 (1983)). "In evaluating the validity of a stop such as this, we must consider the 'totality of the circumstances--the whole picture.' " Id. 490 U.S. at 8, 109 S.Ct. at 1585 (quoting United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 417, 101 S.Ct. 690, 695, 66 L.Ed.2d 621 (1981)).

Considering the whole picture, then, the question before us is whether the facts known to Deputy Ruch at the time he stopped Platt's car were sufficient to warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that an investigation was appropriate. We believe they were.

The whole picture shows that Deputy Ruch pulled up behind a motorist by the side of a country road in the dead of night. The motorist immediately fled--with great haste--before the deputy even had a chance to get out of his car and see what was going on. These facts alone were sufficient to give rise to a reasonable suspicion in the mind of a trained police officer that some further investigation was warranted.

Flight at the sight of police is undeniably suspicious behavior. As the Supreme Court of Wisconsin has noted, "suspicious conduct by its very nature is ambiguous, and the principle function of the investigative stop is to quickly resolve that ambiguity." State v. Anderson, 155 Wis.2d 77, 84, 454 N.W.2d 763, 766 (1990). Deputy Ruch was attempting to resolve the ambiguity created by Platt's suspicious behavior when he temporarily detained him. We will not proscribe such a reasonable response to an inherently suspicious activity. Indeed, the citizens of Whitley County would not have been well served had Ruch ignored his common sense reaction in the face of Platt's abrupt departure and allowed him to ramble down the highway with a BAC that turned out to be nearly two times the legal limit.

This conclusion finds precedent elsewhere. In United States v. Pope, 561 F.2d 663 (6th Cir.1977), the sixth circuit approved an investigatory stop of an airline passenger fitting a drug courier profile who fled when drug enforcement agents approached him in an airport terminal and displayed their credentials. The court said:

Appellant's flight in the face of a clear showing of lawful authority supplied the agent with grounds to reasonably suspect that Appellant was engaged in criminal activity. Flight invites pursuit and colors conduct which hitherto has appeared innocent ... [F]light from a clearly identified law enforcement officer may furnish sufficient ground for a limited investigative stop.

Id. at 668-669 (emphasis added). See also United States v. Jackson, 741 F.2d 223, 224 (8th Cir.1984) (stop upheld when police on routine patrol drove into an alley and observed two men flee while yelling, " 'It's the police, man, run.' "); People v. Tribett, 98 Ill.App.3d 663, 672, 53 Ill.Dec. 897, 903, 424 N.E.2d 688, 694 (1981) (stop upheld when man darted into an alley after observing police car ten or twenty feet away; "[f]rom the officer's viewpoint defendant's conduct at 10:30 p.m. was at least reasonably suspicious to justify an inquiry into his sudden flight."); Michigan v. Chesternut, 486 U.S. 567, 576, 108 S.Ct. 1975, 1981, 100 L.Ed.2d 565 (1988) (Kennedy, J., concurring) ("respondent's unprovoked flight gave the police ample cause to stop him").

The Wisconsin Supreme Court's opinion in Anderson, 454 N.W.2d 763, is most persuasive. It stressed that the fundamental focus of the fourth amendment is reasonableness. "The question of what constitutes reasonableness is a common sense test. What is reasonable under the circumstances? What would a reasonable police officer reasonably suspect in light of his or her training and experience? What should a reasonable police officer do?" Id., 454 N.W.2d at 766. We conclude that common sense dictates and supports Deputy Ruch's response to Platt's actions. He did what a reasonable police officer should do.

While we have cited precedent on point from other jurisdictions, we hasten to add that our holding today is not inconsistent with recent Indiana decisions in this area. In Hailey v. State (1988), Ind., 521 N.E.2d 1318, this Court approved an investigatory stop where a police officer observed the defendant walking in downtown Evansville at 1:30 a.m., saw that he was acting suspiciously, and that he changed direction and increased his speed after noticing the officer. While this author dissented in Hailey, the majority held otherwise. Moreover, Platt's conduct in the instant case was far more suspicious, and could more fairly be characterized as flight in the eyes of an investigating officer.

Such rulings do not give police carte blanche to make arbitrary or...