State v. Boatright
| Decision Date | 01 October 2008 |
| Docket Number | 050444048.,A132643. |
| Citation | 193 P.3d 78,222 Or. App. 406 |
| Parties | STATE of Oregon, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Ronald Lee BOATRIGHT, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | Oregon Court of Appeals |
Zachary L. Mazer, Deputy Public Defender, argued the cause for appellant. With him on the brief was Peter Gartlan, Chief Defender, Legal Services Division.
Tiffany Keast, Assistant Attorney General, argued the cause for respondent. With her on the brief were Hardy Myers, Attorney General, and Mary H. Williams, Solicitor General.
Before BREWER, Chief Judge, and ORTEGA, Judge, and CARSON, Senior Judge.
Defendant appeals a conviction for driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII), arguing only that the police officer did not have probable cause to stop him for a traffic offense. We conclude that the officer had probable cause to stop defendant for a violation of ORS 803.550 (2005),1 illegal alteration or display of a registration plate, and therefore affirm the conviction.
The facts that are relevant to our disposition are undisputed. When Officer Sweeney pulled up behind defendant's pickup truck at a stop sign at 10:30 p.m. on March 21, 2005, he noticed that the design of the truck's rear bumper partially obscured the registration stickers on the truck's license plate. When defendant pulled away from the stop sign, his truck lurched and appeared to stall, causing an oncoming vehicle to slow down to avoid a collision. Sweeney followed defendant for a short distance and then stopped him; he believed that he had probable cause to do so both for illegal display of a registration plate and for impeding traffic. ORS 811.130.2 During the stop, Sweeney obtained the evidence that led to defendant's arrest and conviction for DUII.
Because it is fundamental to our decision, we describe the location of the rear license plate on defendant's pickup in some detail. The left and right portions of the rear bumper of the pickup ran directly below the bottom of the pickup's tailgate and protruded several inches from it. An indentation in the center of the bumper extended back to approximately the vertical plane of the tailgate in order to create a place for installing the license plate. A horizontal steel plate continued along the bottom of the indentation, connecting the left and right portions of the bumper. That horizontal plate, however, stopped before it reached the rear of the indentation, thereby leaving an empty slot directly at the back of the indentation. The screw holes for attaching the license plate were designed so that the lowest portion of the license plate fit into that slot, with the result that the horizontal portion of the bumper obscured the bottom most portion of the license plate.
The bumper was thus designed so that, when the license plate was installed as intended, a person looking at the license plate from a following car could not see the entire plate. It was possible to see the plate number without any obstruction. However, the horizontal portion of the bumper partially obscured the registration stickers on the bottom of the license plate that showed the month and year that the registration expired. The color of the sticker for the month, which was in the bottom left corner of the plate, was clearly visible, as was the top of the number "10," standing for October. The color of the sticker for the year, which was in the bottom right corner, was also visible, but it was impossible to see any part of the number, in this case "2006." It was possible to see the entire license plate, including the registration stickers, only when one was standing almost directly above the bumper and looking down into the slot. The question on appeal is whether that display of the license plate gave Sweeney the authority to stop defendant for a violation of ORS 803.550.
In order to stop and detain a person for a traffic violation, an officer must have probable cause to believe that the person committed a violation. ORS 810.410; State v. Matthews, 320 Or. 398, 403, 884 P.2d 1224 (1994). That means that the officer must subjectively believe that an violation occurred and that the officer's belief must be objectively reasonable. State v. Miller, 345 Or. 176, 186, 191 P.3d 651 (2008).
As the court reinforced in Miller, an "officer's belief may be objectively reasonable even if it turns out to be incorrect." State v. Tiffin, 202 Or.App. 199, 203, 121 P.3d 9 (2005). Thus, probable cause may be based on a mistake of fact. Id. Moreover, probable cause may be based on a mistake as to which law the defendant violated. Miller, 345 Or. at 186, 191 P.3d 651; State v. Cloman, 254 Or. 1, 12, 456 P.2d 67 (1969). Nevertheless, in order to satisfy the objective component, the facts that the officer perceives to exist must establish the elements of an offense, even if not the offense that the officer believed the defendant committed. State v. Chilson, 219 Or.App. 136, 139-40, 182 P.3d 241, rev. den., 344 Or. 670, 189 P.3d 25 (2008); Tiffin, 202 Or.App. at 204, 121 P.3d 9. Finally, although the facts as perceived by the officer must constitute the elements of an offense, in order to satisfy the objective component, an officer need not eliminate the possibility that a defense or exception to the offense applies. State v. Isley, 182 Or.App. 186, 190-92, 48 P.3d 179 (2002); State v. Bourget-Goddard, 164 Or.App. 573, 578, 993 P.2d 814 (1999), rev. den., 330 Or. 331, 6 P.3d 1101 (2000).
The question on appeal is whether Sweeney's subjective belief that he had probable cause to believe that defendant violated ORS 803.550 when he drove his pickup with the rear license plate installed as we have described was objectively reasonable. At the time of the stop the relevant portions of that statute provided:
The effect of the design of the bumper on defendant's pickup was to obscure the registration sticker that showed the year of expiration of the license plate when the plate was viewed from the position in which another motorist would view it.3 Under ORS 803.550(2), the specific descriptions of altering, modifying, covering, or obscuring a license plate in the rest of the subsection are nonexclusive examples. ORS 803.550(2)(c) provides that a registration plate is illegally altered if the frame or plate holder obscures the registration stickers. We need not decide whether the bumper was itself a frame or plate holder. If the bumper is a plate holder, its design obscured the year sticker and thus expressly violated ORS 803.550(2)(c). If the bumper was not a plate holder, it obscured the sticker in the same way that a plate holder would and thereby came within the more general prohibition of ORS 803.550(2). Based on the text of the statute alone, Sweeney's subjective belief that defendant had violated the statute was objectively reasonable.
Defendant raises a number of arguments that challenge that conclusion. He first suggests that the problem arises from the bumper manufacturer's inadequate design, not from anything that defendant did. Assuming that that argument relates to whether defendant knowingly violated ORS 803.550, it is irrelevant to whether Sweeney had probable cause to believe that defendant had violated the statute. In Isley, the defendant argued that he had committed the infraction at issue because the officer's bright lights had blinded him; we held that that potential defense did not affect whether there was probable cause for a stop. 182 Or.App. at 191, 48 P.3d 179. In the same way, Sweeney did not need to determine who was responsible for obscuring the sticker; what matters for probable cause was the fact that the sticker was obscured.
Defendant next argues that the legislature was concerned only with plates that are obscured by a frame or plate holder, not plates that are obscured by something else. That argument ignores the "not limited to" wording of ORS 803.550(2), which makes it clear that the statutory examples are not the exclusive methods of violating the statute. Defendant's final argument, that the registration sticker was not obscured because Sweeney could tell the year from the color of the sticker, ignores that the statute contemplates the officer being able to "read" numbers on the sticker. See ORS 803.550(2)(c).
Defendant next turns to the legislative history of ORS 803.550 to support his arguments. Defendant has...
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...probable cause may be based on a mistake of fact or a mistake as to precisely "which law the defendant violated." State v. Boatright , 222 Or. App. 406, 410, 193 P.3d 78, rev. den. , 345 Or. 503, 200 P.3d 147 (2008) (emphasis in original). What matters is whether the facts that the officer ......
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