West v. State

• Decision Date: 06 July 2016
• Docket Number: No. 504, 2015,504, 2015
• Citation: 143 A.3d 712
• Parties: Tracey West, Defendant Below, Appellant, v. State of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.
• Court: Supreme Court of Delaware

143 A.3d 712

Tracey West, Defendant Below, Appellant

v.State of Delaware, Plaintiff Below, Appellee.

No. 504, 2015

Supreme Court of Delaware.

Submitted: May 11, 2016

Decided: July 6, 2016

Santino Cecotti, Esquire, and James O. Turner, Jr., Esquire, Office of the Public Defender, Wilmington, Delaware, for Defendant Below, Appellant Tracey West.

Sean P. Lugg, Esquire, Delaware Department of Justice, Wilmington, Delaware, for Plaintiff Below, Appellee State of Delaware.

Before STRINE, Chief Justice; H OLLAND, VALIHURA, VA UGHN and S EITZ, Justices; constituting the Court en banc.

SEITZ

, Justice, for the Majority:

I. INTRODUCTION

At about two o'clock in the morning police officer Thomas Gaul followed a car for three or four miles as it drifted back and forth in its lane. As the car entered a ramp to join S.R. 1, Officer Gaul saw the car swerve sharply to avoid hitting a concrete island. He turned on the emergency lights and signaled for the car to stop. After the car pulled over, Officer Gaul approached the car's driver, Tracey West, and smelled alcohol. West staggered out of the car and failed field sobriety tests. Gaul arrested West and charged her with an illegal lane change and driving under the influence.

Before trial, West moved to suppress the evidence that she was intoxicated. She claimed that Officer Gaul lacked the reasonable suspicion required by the Fourth Amendment to make an investigative stop of her car. Thus, any evidence of her intoxication gathered after the stop should be suppressed. After hearing testimony from the officer and reviewing the video from the police car camera, the Court of Common Pleas trial judge dismissed the lane change charge, but denied the motion to suppress. The court ruled that the community caretaker doctrine permitted the stop so the officer could check on the welfare of the driver. The State then introduced at trial the evidence of her intoxicated state, and a jury convicted West of drunk driving.

West appealed her conviction to the Superior Court, which affirmed the trial court's ruling on the community caretaker doctrine, and also found that Officer Gaul had reasonable suspicion to stop West for driving while intoxicated. West then appealed to our Court. She claims the community caretaker doctrine did not apply, and Officer Gaul lacked reasonable suspicion as required by the Fourth Amendment for an investigatory stop of her car.

After a careful review of the record on appeal, we affirm the judgment of the Superior Court. It is unnecessary to decide whether the community caretaker doctrine should be extended to the facts of this case. Instead, we agree with the Superior Court that Officer Gaul had reasonable and articulable suspicion to make an investigatory stop of West's car. Her erratic driving culminating in almost crashing into a concrete island and swerving sharply before entering the highway provided reasonable suspicion for Officer Gaul to stop her car to investigate whether she was driving while impaired.

II. STATEMENT OF FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

In the early morning hours of June 22, 2014, Officer Gaul was on routine patrol traveling on Route 273 westbound toward S.R. 1 in New Castle County, Delaware. He noticed a vehicle in front of him, which “was kind of driving a little bit erratically.”¹ When asked what he meant by “erratically,” he testified that it was “just kinda drifting back and forth in the lane,” and that this occurred several times over a distance of three to four miles.² According to Officer Gaul, at one point the tires hit the shoulder and then came back into the lane. When the vehicle reached the ramp leading onto Route 1 northbound, it turned to get on the ramp and then narrowly avoided colliding with a concrete island. According to the officer, the driver of the vehicle had to make a “sharp turn of the wheel to maintain the lane.”³ At that point, the officer turned on his emergency lights and pulled the vehicle over.

When the officer initially observed the vehicle drifting back and forth in its lane, his subjective thought was that the operator may have been “tired or whatever, so that's what drew [his] attention to it.”⁴ On cross-examination, the officer agreed that initially he did not have sufficient cause to stop the appellant, but as his observations increased, “there was reasonable suspicion.”⁵ The Court of Common Pleas judge asked Officer Gaul why he stopped the car. He said “basically safety of the operator,” and that it was “more of a welfare check at that point, check on her.”⁶ He further stated that when he pulled her over, it was not his intention to write her a ticket.

When the officer made direct contact with West after stopping her car, he noticed a “very strong odor of alcohol.”⁷

After further investigation, the officer arrested West for making an illegal lane change and for driving under the influence. The Court of Common Pleas dismissed the charge of making an illegal lane change, finding that no lane change occurred. But the court denied her motion to suppress evidence of intoxication because the stop was justified under the community caretaker doctrine. The jury then convicted West of driving under the influence.

West appealed her conviction and the denial of her motion to suppress evidence to the Superior Court. The Superior Court affirmed on the grounds that the stop was justified under the community caretaker doctrine and also on the alternative ground that West's erratic driving gave rise to a reasonable and articulable suspicion that she was impaired and therefore driving under the influence of alcohol.⁸ This appeal followed.

III. STANDARD OF REVIEW

We review the grant or denial of a motion to suppress for abuse of discretion.⁹ We review the trial judge's factual findings to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to support the findings and whether those findings were clearly erroneous.¹⁰ To the extent that we examine the trial judge's legal conclusions, we review them de novo for errors in formulating or applying legal precepts.¹¹ “Where, as here, we are reviewing the denial of motion to suppress evidence based on an allegedly illegal stop and seizure, we conduct a de novo review to determine whether the totality of the circumstances, in light of the trial judge's factual findings, support a reasonable and articulable suspicion for the stop.”¹²

IV. ANALYSIS

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures....”¹³ The “essential purpose” of Fourth Amendment proscriptions “is to impose a standard of ‘reasonableness' upon the exercise of discretion by government officials, including law enforcement agents, in order ‘to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions....' ”¹⁴

When law enforcement directs a driver to stop her car, the State has “seized” the car and its occupants, and the protections of the Fourth Amendment apply. But it is only those searches and seizures that are “unreasonable” that run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. In the traffic stop context, under established law since Terry v. Ohio,

a seizure is reasonable when a law enforcement officer conducts a brief investigatory traffic stop based on reasonable and articulable suspicion of criminal activity.¹⁵ Reasonable and articulable suspicion of criminal activity includes not just traffic offenses, but criminal activity such as drunk driving.¹⁶

As a court reviews the reasonableness of the officer's suspicion of criminal activity, “it is imperative that the facts be judged against an objective standard: would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search ‘warrant a [person] of reasonable caution in the belief’ that the action taken was appropriate?”¹⁷ The subjective good faith of the arresting officer is not controlling because “[i]f subjective good faith alone were the test, the protections of the Fourth Amendment would evaporate, and the people would be ‘secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects,’ only in the discretion of the police.”¹⁸ In Delaware, the court can also “combin[e] objective facts with such an officer's subjective interpretation of those facts.”¹⁹ When considering the objective facts, the limited consideration of an officer's subjective thoughts allows the court to accord weight to an officer's training and experience in detecting criminal activity.²⁰ In other words, the objective facts are viewed through the lens of a reasonable, trained police officer.

Whether reasonable and articulable suspicion of criminal activity exists depends on the totality of the circumstances and “the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent [people], not legal technicians, act.”²¹ The Supreme Court of the United States recently observed that we should use a “commonsense approach” when evaluating the Fourth Amendment's reasonable suspicion requirement.²² The reviewing court should “appropriately recognize certain driving behaviors as sound indicia of drunk driving.”²³

Here, the objective facts establish reasonable and articulable suspicion that West might have been driving while impaired. We have the advantage of a video from Officer Gaul's patrol car recording some of the events leading to West's stop. The video shows West drifting back and forth in her lane. Officer Gaul confirmed that he followed West for three or four miles while she drove “kind of erratically.” Although weaving within a lane by itself may be insufficient to establish reasonable suspicion of impaired driving, as the video shows, West then nearly crashed into a concrete island and swerved sharply while entering the ramp to a major highway. Looking at the totality of the circumstances—the erratic driving for three or four miles followed by a near crash into a concrete...