State v. Miller
| Decision Date | 27 December 2013 |
| Docket Number | No. 109,354.,109,354. |
| Citation | 49 Kan.App. 491,308 P.3d 24 |
| Parties | STATE of Kansas, Appellant, v. Heather K. MILLER, Appellee. |
| Court | Kansas Court of Appeals |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Syllabus by the Court
1. An officer can make a traffic stop when the officer knows of specific and articulable facts—facts that can be clearly expressed—that create a reasonable suspicion that a person has violated a traffic law.
2. An officer's reasonable suspicion may be based on a reasonable mistake about the underlying facts, but an officer may not rely upon a mistaken understanding of the law to provide reasonable suspicion.
3. On the facts of this case, one officer reasonably believed that other officers were
still blocking a highway entrance so that drivers would not approach an accident scene. Actually, the other officers had left their post briefly and a driver had then entered the highway. Even so, the officer reasonably believed that the other officers were still blocking the entrance, so the officer who stopped the driver had reasonable suspicion to believe that the driver had disobeyed lawful traffic-control directives, which is a traffic infraction. Thus, the officer's traffic stop of the vehicle was lawfully based upon reasonable suspicion that the driver had committed a traffic infraction.
4. Under a rule known as the collective-knowledge doctrine or the fellow-officer rule, the knowledge of one officer may sometimes be imputed to—or assumed to be known by—another officer when determining whether an officer had reasonable suspicion in a situation. Imputation of knowledge in such cases is based upon the existence of at least some communication of information between the officers. Here, there was no communication between the officers who left the roadblock and the officer who made the traffic stop about the circumstances leading to that stop; thus the collective-knowledge doctrine cannot be applied to impute the knowledge that the other officers had left their post to the officer who made the traffic stop.
Alex Scott, assistant district attorney, Shawn E. Minihan, assistant district attorney, Stephen M. Howe, district attorney, and Derek Schmidt, attorney general, for appellant.
Adrian T. Gilby, of Overland Park, for appellee.
Before BRUNS, P.J., PIERRON and LEBEN, JJ.
In the early morning hours of November 2, 2011, debris from a two-car accident on I–35 in Lenexa caused authorities to shut the interstate to traffic. While Kansas Highway Patrol Trooper Nicholas Wright was working the accident, a car driven by Heather Miller came toward him—it was the only car on a roadway that Wright thought was still closed to vehicle traffic. So he stopped Miller for the apparent violation of a state law requiring drivers to comply with traffic-control directions.
It turned out that the officers who Wright thought were still blocking the roadway had been diverted briefly to another spot, and Miller simply drove onto the interstate without disregarding any officers, emergency flares, or traffic cones. Unfortunately for her, once the trooper stopped her car, he quickly suspected she was under the influence of alcohol—a suspicion that was confirmed through field-sobriety testing and an evidentiary breath test.
Miller argued in the district court that the evidence against her should be suppressed because she had done nothing wrong by driving onto the scene, thus she shouldn't have been stopped in the first place. The district court agreed. Though the court said the officer was “honestly mistaken” and showed no bad faith in stopping Miller, the court concluded that the officer nonetheless was mistaken and shouldn't have made the stop. The court suppressed the evidence found after the stop, including the evidence that Miller was driving while intoxicated.
The State has appealed, contending that an officer's action isn't invalidated for a mistake of fact so long as the officer had a reasonable belief that facts existed that would have justified the traffic stop. We agree.
On appeal from a district court's order on a motion to suppress evidence, we accept the district court's factual findings if they are supported by substantial evidence. But we independently review its legal conclusions, without any required deference. State v. Sanchez–Loredo, 294 Kan. 50, 54, 272 P.3d 34 (2012). Here, other than saying that the officer was “honestly mistaken,” the district court really made no specific factual findings. We will discuss the basic facts of the case, which do not appear to be in dispute, and then consider independently whether the evidence should have been suppressed.
Trooper Wright was the officer in charge at the accident scene, and he had directed closure of the interstate while the accident was investigated since there was debris scattered over the roadway. He had personnel from the Kansas Department of Transportation block traffic by forcing southbound vehicles to exit at 95th Street, and he had Lenexa police officers block the 95th Street entrance ramp going onto the interstate southbound. Wright observed those roadblocks in place. While working at the scene for 1 hour and 20 minutes, Wright saw no unauthorized vehicles come through.
He then saw Miller's car coming toward him. His understanding of police procedure was that the interstate would remain blocked until he—as the officer in charge of the investigation—ordered it to be reopened. Accordingly, he initially thought the vehicle was a police or Department of Transportation vehicle, but he testified that he was “shocked” to see that it was a private vehicle. Wright said he believed the driver either drove around traffic cones that were blocking the highway or drove around the Lenexa police officers who were blocking the entrance ramp. So he initiated a traffic stop.
Miller seemed confused when Wright asked her what she was doing. That reaction was understandable since Miller said there hadn't been any police cars blocking the entrance ramp. And that proved to be true—Lenexa officers later came to the scene and told Wright that they'd left their post on the entrance ramp briefly because they had to deal with a disturbance involving a trucker.
By that time, however, Wright had begun to suspect that Miller was driving while intoxicated. He arrested her after she performed poorly on some field-sobriety tests, and her evidentiary breath test resulted in a .122 reading, well above the legal limit of .08.
So where does this leave us legally? Based upon what Trooper Wright knew at the time, he believed that Miller had committed a traffic infraction. It's a violation of K.S.A. 8–1503 to refuse to comply with an officer's traffic-control directives, and an officer may conduct a traffic stop where an officer knows of specific and articulable facts—facts that can be clearly expressed—that create a reasonable suspicion that a person has violated a traffic law. See State v. Coleman, 292 Kan. 813, 817–18, 257 P.3d 320 (2011); State v. Marx, 289 Kan. 657, 661–62, 215 P.3d 601 (2009).
The State argues that Wright gave specific facts supporting reasonable suspicion—a particularized and objective basis for suspecting that the person stopped is involved in criminal activity. See Coleman, 292 Kan. at 817–18, 257 P.3d 320. Indeed, Wright identified several facts supporting his belief that Miller had disobeyed an officer's traffic instructions:
• Wright had directed that the interstate highway be closed to traffic while he carried out the accident investigation and cleanup.
• He understood that the standard policy was to keep the road closed until the officer in charge of the investigation—in this case, himself—had directed the road to be reopened.
• He had seen that police officers had taken positions blocking the entrance ramp and that other personnel had placed cones directing traffic already on the interstate to exit before the accident site.
• Other than emergency and law-enforcement vehicles, Miller's vehicle was the first—and only—car he had seen driving on the closed section of the interstate in more than an hour, and he had not reopened the roadway to traffic.
Those facts, specific and articulated by Wright, provided reasonable suspicion that Miller had violated K.S.A. 8–1503, thus justifying a traffic stop.
Of course, we now know that Wright's...
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... ... information or directives to act received from other ... officers, so their aggregate understanding of the ... circumstances may furnish the reasonable suspicion for an ... investigatory detention or probable cause for an arrest. See ... State v. Miller , 49 Kan.App.2d 491, 496-97, 308 P.3d ... 24 (2013) (outlining collective-knowledge doctrine); see also ... State v. Niblock , 230 Kan. 156, 161, 631 P.2d 661 ... (1981) (recognizing doctrine without describing its ... contours). The officer acting on the shared knowledge ... ...
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