Opinion ID: 2601972
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Seizure: Initial Contact

Text: [¶ 7] Appellant claims that he was seized for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution or of Article I, Section 4 of the Wyoming Constitution when Officer Baedke stopped him on the street and asked for his name. We have described the three levels of contact between police and citizens as follows: The most intrusive encounter, an arrest, requires justification by probable cause to believe that a person has committed or is committing a crime. The investigatory stop represents a seizure which invokes Fourth Amendment safeguards, but, by its less intrusive character, requires only the presence of specific and articulable facts and rational inferences which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that a person has committed or may be committing a crime. The least intrusive police-citizen contact, a consensual encounter, involves no restraint of liberty and elicits the citizen's voluntary cooperation with non-coercive questioning. Wilson v. State, 874 P.2d 215, 220 (Wyo.1994) (citations omitted). Under both the federal and the Wyoming state constitutions, a person has been seized only if, in view of all of the circumstances surrounding the incident, a reasonable person would have believed that he was not free to leave. Id. (quoting United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 554-55, 100 S.Ct. 1870, 1877, 64 L.Ed.2d 497 (1980)). We have already determined that [a] request for identification is not, by itself, a seizure. Id. at 222. In Wilson, we found that a consensual encounter with police remained consensual when a police officer requested identification and ran a computerized warrant check using that information. Id. We found that a seizure occurred in that case only after the citizen complied with the officer's order not to leave while the check was being completed. Id. at 223. [¶ 8] Unlike in Wilson, Appellant in this case was never instructed not to leave. Officer Baedke ran the warrant check while engaged in casual conversation with Appellant, and the patrol car's computer returned the results in three to five seconds. Officer Baedke made no show of authority that would have caused a reasonable person to believe he could not leave the scene. Appellant claims that the fact that Officer Baedke hesitated and looked at Appellant expectantly when Appellant only provided his first name was sufficient to convert the encounter from a consensual interaction to a stop requiring reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. We are not prepared to find, in the absence of any other aggravating factor, that a mere expectant look can constitute detention for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution or Article I, Section 4 of the Wyoming Constitution.