State v. Moffatt
| Decision Date | 12 January 1990 |
| Docket Number | No. C5-89-670,C5-89-670 |
| Citation | 450 N.W.2d 116 |
| Parties | STATE of Minnesota, Appellant, v. Rolland Lee MOFFATT, Gerald Joe Moffatt, and Terry Lee Theis, Respondents. |
| Court | Minnesota Supreme Court |
Syllabus by the Court
Police did not violate defendants' Fourth Amendment rights (a) in stopping their car a short distance from scene of burglary moments after the burglary was committed; (b) in detaining suspects for one hour, where the reasonable suspicion justifying the detention remained and the officers acted diligently and reasonably under the circumstances; (c) in placing the suspects in separate squad cars; and (d) in temporarily seizing one shoe from each suspect for the purpose of comparing the shoes with footprints left at the scene of the burglary.
Hubert H. Humphrey, III, Atty. Gen., St. Paul, and James A. Terwedo, Scott County Atty., Susan K. McNellis, Asst. County Atty., Shakopee, for appellant.
Dennis Miller, Golden Valley, for Rolland Lee Moffatt.
Mark Anderson, Asst. State Public Defender, Minneapolis, for Gerald Joe Moffatt.
Richard Indritz, Reed & Pond, Ltd., Mound, for Terry Lee Theis.
Considered and decided by the court en banc without oral argument.
The issue on this pre-trial appeal by the state is whether the trial court erred in suppressing evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds in the prosecution of defendants for burglary and criminal damage to property. The court of appeals, in an unpublished opinion, affirmed the trial court's suppression order. We granted the state's petition for review and the defendant's cross-petition. Concluding that the police did not violate defendants' Fourth Amendment rights, we reverse and remand for trial.
At 2:04 a.m. on Friday, July 29, 1988, a burglar alarm went off at Prior Lake Marine, a business located in Savage but one which is closer to downtown Prior Lake than it is to downtown Savage. Officer Andrew Ferderer of the Prior Lake Police Department, responding to the dispatcher's request at 2:07 for assistance in investigating a burglary in progress, drove toward the scene of the burglary. The only car he saw was a red 1983 Plymouth Horizon with three men in it driving on a residential street just two blocks from Prior Lake Marine and headed away from that area. Ferderer turned and stopped the car about a mile from the scene. The time of the stop was approximately 2:15 a.m.
Ferderer waited until Officer Terrance Gliniany of the Savage Police Department arrived to assist, then approached the car on foot. Another officer arrived a short time later. The three men in the car were all in short-sleeved shirts and jeans and were sweating heavily (their bodies were literally "soaked with sweat"). Although it was a warm night, the heavy sweating apparently was inconsistent with the men having just been driving around in the car. Ferderer could see that the driver and the rear-seat passenger were wearing tennis shoes and that the front-seat passenger was barefooted. In fact, as Gliniany testified, the front-seat passenger's feet were muddy.
After telling the men in the front-seat to put their hands on the dashboard (a security precaution), Ferderer asked the driver, Theis, what he was doing in the area. He said he had stopped to "take a leak" and that they were on their way to New Prague to visit a friend. Ferderer asked who the friend was and apparently no name was given. Ferderer told the men that there had just been a burglary in the area and that they were checking it out. He did not tell the men that they were suspects.
A decision was made to separate the men from each other by placing them in separate squad cars. Ferderer did this by removing each of the men, one at a time, frisking him for weapons and then placing him in a squad car. In our opinion, there were two good reasons for this: the safety of the officers, who did not know if the men had weapons in the car, and the interest in keeping the men from talking with each other and agreeing on a story if in fact they were the burglars.
After the three men were placed in the separate squad cars, Officer Gliniany contacted Officer Brandt, who was with other officers at the scene of the burglary, and asked Brandt if there were footprints at the scene. Brandt reported that there were.
Under instructions received by radio from a police sergeant at the scene of the burglary, the officers then told each of the two men with shoes to take off one tennis shoe. It was at this point that Theis says he asked one of the officers if he was under arrest, and the officer said, "No, you're being detained." One of the officers got the third tennis shoe, that of the barefoot front-seat passenger, by reaching in and removing it from the floor of the front-seat passenger side, where it had been in open view. It was then about 2:45 a.m. Officer Randall Klegin of the Savage Police Department, who had been roused from sleep by a dispatcher at 2:20 a.m., 5 minutes after the stop, drove to the scene of the stop, arriving there about 15 minutes after the shoes had been seized, picked up the three shoes, and drove them to the scene of the burglary. There he compared the distinctive treads of the tennis shoes, each a different brand, with the two different fresh tennis shoe footprints he found and he concluded that the pattern and size of each of the prints were such that the prints must have been made by two of the men.
Ten to fifteen minutes after Klegin picked up the shoes, Sergeant McColl contacted the officers at the scene of the stop and told them of the match. The officers then placed handcuffs on the three men, told them that they were being taken into custody, gave them Miranda warnings, and impounded the stopped car. This occurred, according to the trial court's findings, at 3:16 a.m., 61 minutes after the car was stopped.
Subsequently, a search warrant was obtained and the car was searched. Three pairs of gloves, a box of tools, a crowbar, and other items were found in the trunk.
The trial court suppressed everything. It appears to have held: (a) the stop was proper; (b) the police obtained probable cause to arrest shortly before 2:45 a.m., i.e., approximately 30 minutes after the stop, shortly before the shoes were taken from the men, because by that time the police officers, as a unit, knew that there were tennis shoe prints at the scene of the burglary and that the three men being detained each had been wearing tennis shoes that night; but (c) the officers did not have a reasonable basis for putting the men in squad cars and detaining them as long as they did; that if they had let the men go when they should have, sometime earlier, the officers would not have been able to seize the shoes and would not have been able to search the trunk.
The court of appeals in its brief unpublished opinion simply said that the police exceeded the permissible duration of an investigative stop both in scope (by placing the men in the squad cars) and in length (by continuing to detain the men after the stopping of the car "produced no new evidence giving them probable cause to arrest").
We conclude that the police acted lawfully:
(a) The initial stop of the car was justified by numerous cases of this court, especially Appelgate v. Commissioner of Pub. Safety, 402 N.W.2d 106 (Minn.1987), where we upheld a "freeze the situation" stop just like the one in this case under similar circumstances (stop of only car in area moments after report of burglary).
(b) The initial observations made by the officers after stopping the car increased the degree of objective suspicion that the occupants may have been involved in the burglary. These observations included the fact that the men were soaked with sweat and gave a lame reason for being in the area.
(c) The United States Supreme Court has...
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