Title: State v. Bruno

State: vermont

Issuer: Vermont Supreme Court

Document:

NOTICE:  This opinion is subject to motions for reargument under V.R.A.P. 40
as well as formal revision before publication in the Vermont Reports.
Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Vermont Supreme
Court, 111 State Street, Montpelier, Vermont 05602 of any errors in order
that corrections may be made before this opinion goes to press.


                                No. 90-014


State of Vermont                             Supreme Court

                                             On Appeal from
     v.                                      District Court of Vermont,
                                             Unit No. 2, Chittenden Circuit

Louis Bruno, Jr.                             September Term, 1990


George T. Costes, J.

William Sorrell, Chittenden County State's Attorney, Burlington, and Gary S.
  Kessler, Resource Attorney, Department of State's Attorneys, Montpelier,
  for plaintiff-appellee

Blais, Cain, Keller & Fowler, Inc., Burlington, for defendant-appellant


PRESENT:  Allen, C.J., Peck, Gibson, Dooley and Morse, JJ.


     ALLEN, C.J.   Defendant Louis Bruno, Jr. appeals from his DUI
conviction, alleging error in the trial court's denial of his motion to
suppress.  We affirm.
     On June 30, 1989, defendant was arrested for DUI and following
arraignment filed a motion to suppress on the ground that there was not a
reasonable basis for the arresting officer's initial stop.  At the hearing
on the suppression motion, the arresting officer testified that he had
observed defendant's vehicle drifting in its lane on Pine Street, that
defendant had pulled into a dead end behind Burlington Electric Department
and briefly parked with the headlights off, and that defendant had operated
his vehicle for a period without its headlights on.  The officer further
testified that he stopped the vehicle because it had no headlights on.  The
defendant denied that his was the car that the arresting officer had
observed drifting on Pine Street and denied operating the vehicle with the
headlights off.
     The motion judge was "unable to find" that defendant was drifting in
his lane and whether he had turned his lights back on when he left the
Electric Department premises.  The motion judge denied defendant's motion
"solely on the factual basis" that defendant, alone in his car, had pulled
into and briefly parked in an "apparently useless dead end."
     At the outset of trial defendant renewed his motion to suppress,
asserting that there was no reasonable basis to stop and that the motion
judge had erred.  The error, defendant argued, was that the officer had
limited his subjective basis for stopping defendant to defendant's
headlights being off.  Thus, in the absence of a finding that defendant's
headlights were off, defendant's motion must be sustained.  To uphold the
stop solely on the basis of defendant's act of pulling into a dead end and
parking was to impermissibly substitute the court's own basis for the
officer's.  The trial judge reserved decision and advised objection at the
appropriate time during trial.  At the close of the State's case, defendant
again renewed his motion, which the trial judge denied.  The trial judge
found that there were sufficient articulable facts to justify the officer's
initial stop of defendant.
     A defendant does not have a vested right in an erroneous pretrial
ruling.  A ruling on a pretrial motion to suppress "is tentative only, and
subject to revision at trial."  State v. Blondin, 128 Vt. 613, 617,