Opinion ID: 1058221
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Reasonable Suspicion Requirement to Seek Consent

Text: The defendant also urges this Court to attach to consent searches a requirement limiting law enforcement personnel to requesting the consent to search only in instances where, at a minimum, the officer has a reasonable suspicion, supported by specific and articulable facts, that contraband or other evidence of a crime will be found during the course of the search. She cites to our decision in State v. Daniel, 12 S.W.3d 420 (Tenn.2000), in which we limited the discretion of law enforcement officers to seize a citizen without reasonable suspicion by asking for and then retaining the citizen's driver's license in order to run a warrants check. [4] The defendant in Daniel was standing with friends in the parking lot of a Knox County convenience store at dusk on a summer night. Id. at 423. The men were approached by a police officer who asked to see identification. Id. The State conceded that the officer had no reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime had been, or was about to be, committed. Id. at 428. The officer took the defendant's driver's license and retained it for some period of time while running a warrants check on the men. Id. at 423. As it turned out, there was an outstanding warrant on the defendant. Id. He was arrested and incident to that arrest, when the officer asked the defendant if he had anything sharp in his pockets, he revealed that he had a bag of marijuana. Id. The defendant was then charged with possession of the marijuana. We pointed out in Daniel that there are three types of police-citizen interactions: full scale arrests, which require probable cause; brief investigatory detentions, which require reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing; and the brief police-citizen encounters, which require no objective justification. Id. at 424 (citations omitted). In Daniel , we found that what began as a brief encounter ripened into a detention when the defendant's license was retained to run a records check. Because such detentions require reasonable suspicion, and because the officer in that case had none, we held that the detention was illegal and that the marijuana, as the fruit of that detention, should have been suppressed. Id. at 428 (citing Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 488, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963)). The facts in this case are distinguishable from Daniel . First, Odell clearly had probable cause to stop the defendant for her traffic infraction. Second, although he determined not to cite her for that infraction, the detention was thereafter justified by the discrepancy in the status of the vehicle license registration. Accordingly, the consent to search the car and consent to search the motel room were not fruit of the poisonous tree as in Daniel . The defendant also cites to a New Jersey case, State v. Carty, 170 N.J. 632, 790 A.2d 903 (2002), in which the Supreme Court of New Jersey held that consent to search following the lawful stop of a motor vehicle would not be deemed valid unless there was a reasonable and articulable suspicion that the motorist or passenger has engaged in, or is about to engage in, criminal activity. Id. at 912. [5] As far as we have been able to discern from our extensive research on this issue, only one other state, New York, has imposed such a requirement on consent searches. See People v. Hollman, 79 N.Y.2d 181, 581 N.Y.S.2d 619, 590 N.E.2d 204 (1992). [6] We do not believe that such a requirement is necessary. As previously noted, we find that the totality of the circumstances test for determining voluntariness of consent adequately safeguards the constitutional protections provided by Article I, section 7 of our own constitution as well. Accordingly, we decline to impose any additional requirements for consent searches. Furthermore, we note the defendant's contention that the initial traffic stop was pretextual and unsupported by probable cause or reasonable suspicion. As the state points out, however, the defendant did not include the issue of the validity of the initial traffic stop within the certified question. [7] Accordingly, the question not having been reserved under Rule 37(b)(2)(i), Rules of Criminal Procedure, we do not address it here. State v. Preston, 759 S.W.2d 647, 650 (Tenn.1988).