Contact: Michael Rushford
(916) 446-0345
The United States Supreme Court this morning unanimously upheld the police search of a suspicious passenger during a traffic stop. The decision in Arizona v. Johnson overturned an Arizona Court of Appeals ruling which had suppressed evidence of a concealed gun and marijuana. The lower court had concluded that by the time the officer frisked the passenger, he was no longer legally seized and could have walked away.
The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation joined the case to encourage a decision to overturn the Arizona court’s ruling.
“This case is important because it involves a police officer’s authority to determine if people confronted in the line of duty are armed and possibly dangerous. In order to make that determination during a traffic stop, an officer must have control of not only the driver, but the passengers as well,” said CJLF Attorney Lauren Altdoerffer, who authored the Foundation’s brief.
In the Court’s decision, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “A lawful roadside stop begins when a vehicle is pulled over for investigation of a traffic violation. The temporary seizure of the driver and passengers ordinarily continues and remains reasonable, for the duration of the stop.”
The case involved the April 2002 traffic stop of an uninsured vehicle at 9:00 p.m. in a Tucson neighborhood noted for gang activity. While one officer talked to the driver, Officer Maria Trevizo noticed a backseat passenger wearing the colors of a local street gang. After the suspect told Trevizo he had recently been released from prison and she noticed a police scanner in his jacket pocket, she asked him to exit the vehicle. Trevizo then conducted a patdown search for weapons and found a handgun and marijuana. The defendant, Lemon Montrea Johnson, was convicted of unlawful possession of a firearm and marijuana. Taking his two prior felony convictions into account, he was sentenced to eight years.
In 2007, the Arizona Court of Appeals overturned the conviction, ruling that because Johnson was not the subject of the traffic stop and had voluntarily stepped out of the vehicle, the officer did not have the necessary reasonable cause to search him. After the Arizona Supreme Court declined to review that holding, the Attorney General asked the nation’s highest court to hear the state’s appeal. Last year, the Supreme Court agreed.
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation joined the case, introducing a scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief which argued that the Arizona court misinterpreted precedent governing a police officer’s control over the occupants of a vehicle during a traffic stop and the “reasonable suspicion” needed to frisk a person for weapons when confronted in the line of duty. The CJLF brief also cited an FBI study of police officers killed in the line of duty to emphasize the dangerous circumstances officers face during traffic stops. The officer in this case had a “reasonable suspicion” that the passenger might be armed, making the facts that he was not driving the car and had volunteered to step out upon request irrelevant.
“Officer Trevizo made a reasonable decision to pat down this suspect in order to assure her safety and that of her partner,” said Altdoerffer. “The Court’s decision today protects an officer’s authority to make the same decision in similar situations,” she added.