The court concluded that the officers lacked sufficient particularized information about Amos's conduct to support a reasonable suspicion for stopping him, and it ordered the drug evidence suppressed. When we review a motion to suppress evidence, we will uphold the circuit court's findings of fact unless they are clearly erroneous. However, the application of constitutional principles to the facts as found is a question of law which we decide without deference to the circuit court's decision. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. U.S. Const. amend.
Statements given and items seized during a period of illegal detention are inadmissible.
The same standards which have been established for rights arising in the United States Constitution apply to rights derived from the Wisconsin Constitution. Wis. Const., art. The question of what constitutes reasonable suspicion is a common sense test. The test is designed to balance the personal intrusion into the suspect's privacy occasioned by the stop against the societal interests in solving crime and bringing offenders to justice. Although recognizing that police officers may explore conduct which has an innocent explanation when there is also a reasonable inference that the conduct is unlawful, we concluded that an inference of unlawfulness was not reasonable when the specified conduct described that of large numbers of innocent persons in the neighborhood.