Opinion ID: 3202267
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Reconsideration of Moats

Text: Despite its widespread adoption and laudatory purpose, at one time four states, Illinois, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Tennessee, “confined the community caretaking doctrine to consensual police-citizen encounters.” Moats, 403 S.W.3d at 190 (Clark and Koch, JJ., dissenting) (citing People v. Luedemann, 857 N.E.2d 187, 197 n.4 (Ill. 2006)). By 2013, however, the supreme courts of Illinois and New Mexico had “explicitly abandoned” this limitation and abrogated prior decisions confining the community caretaking doctrine to consensual police-citizen interactions. Id. (citing Luedemann, 857 N.E.2d at 198-99; State v. Ryon, 108 P.3d 1032, 1041 (N.M. 2005)). However, three years ago in Moats, a three-to-two decision, this Court reaffirmed prior decisions that had limited the community caretaking doctrine to third-tier “consensual police-citizen encounters that do not require probable cause or reasonable suspicion, whereas the requisite level of probable cause or reasonable suspicion must be satisfied when a seizure has taken place.” Id. at 182. The Moats majority grounded this limitation in the Tennessee Constitution, id. at 187 n.8, even though the defendant had neither relied upon the state constitution nor argued that it provided greater protection than the Fourth Amendment, and even though this Court had “long held” that article I, section 7 “is identical in intent and purpose to the Fourth Amendment,” State v. Williams, 185 S.W.3d 311, 315 (Tenn. 2006) (citing State v. Binette, 33 S.W.3d 215, 218 (Tenn. 2000); Sneed v. State, 423 S.W.2d 857, 860 (Tenn. 1968)); see also State v. Donaldson, 380 S.W.3d 86, 92 (Tenn. 2012) (“[I]n the context of traffic stops, the protections afforded by article I, section 7 of the Tennessee Constitution [are] coextensive with the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment as defined in [Whren, 517 U.S. at 813].” (citing State v. Vineyard, 958 S.W.2d 730, 734, 736 (Tenn. 1997))). - 11 -