Court Opinion

ID: 9540213
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:13:41.081671+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:59:44.006158
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE KUEHN, specially concurring: The recent United States Supreme Court decision handed down in City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 148 L. Ed. 2d 333, 121 S. Ct. 447 (2000), would appear to control the outcome of this case. Since the Effingham County sheriffs enterprising, and quite successful, exploration for illegal drugs required the indiscriminate stop and detention of everyone who happened to travel exit 151, it echoes the indiscriminate drug exploration engaged in by the Indianapolis police officers, an operation reviewed, and struck down, by the high court. There is no constitutional salvation in this particular operation’s deceitful twist, for its potential lure of drug-toting criminals onto exit 151, and into police custody for interrogation, provided no means for differentiating potential offenders from innocent wayfarers using the exit to simply get somewhere. Moreover, every traveler had a constitutional right to avoid the indiscriminate detention and search that the signs claimed would lie ahead. Their travel of a different route was a simple exercise of that right. The dissent is taken by the authorities’ use of phony warnings designed to arouse fear that an imminent roadblock, complete with drug-dog searches, awaited anyone who continued to travel north on Interstate 57. Such impending prospect would prove a serious threat to drug traffickers. Since it would tend to chase wrongdoers with something to hide from the interstate, and exit 151 afforded the most ready avenue of escape, we are told that the deputies from Effingham County possessed something that the Indianapolis police officers lacked — an individualized suspicion that those who disembarked Interstate 57 by way of exit 151 were engaged in criminal activity. Since whatever suspicions the deputies possessed were derived solely from a traveler’s decision to get off of the interstate at exit 151, we are left with the question whether that decision could afford a legal justification for the universal detention of the traveling public and the indiscriminate investigation into the circumstances of their travels. The interstate highway system is the primary instrumentality by which people move from state to state within this country. When travelers utilize it, they must inevitably exit it and travel other highways and roads in order to get where they ultimately want to go. A cursory look at an Illinois road map instructs that interstate travelers from all points south of Effingham would likely take exit 151 if their final destination was any one of the following Illinois towns: Watson, Mason, Heartville, Dieterich, Newton, Oblong, or Robinson. It could also be the exit of choice for travelers trying to visit the southern part of Effingham. Most assuredly, it would become the obvious exit of choice for anyone wanting to go anywhere in Effingham if they read signs suggestive of a roadblock on the interstate between exit 151 and the other Effingham exits that lie to the north. People traveling the interstate are usually interested in getting somewhere at an appointed hour. Any interstate traveler, intent on getting to Mattoon, Champaign, Terre Haute, Kankakee, or Chicago without the prospect of uncertain delay and bother, might easily decide to forgo the interstate for a brief time in order to avoid policemen and their dogs as they tried to ferret out drug traffickers from among the mass of cars and trucks rolling in their direction. The notion of an interstate roadblock with an unidentified number of drug-sniffing dogs in use might arouse a vision of traffic congestion and delay. Time-conscious travelers, with this uncertain image in mind, could be expected to consult a road map to determine whether an efficient alternate route of travel could allow them to bypass the operation. People seeking nothing more than to continue their travels in unobstructed fashion could decide to take exit 151. Given the uncertain alternative ahead, the exit’s use would be the smart move. It lies approximately a mile or so away from Highway 45, which runs north and south, and intersects Interstate 57 a dozen or so miles to the north, at a point beyond the phantom policemen and their phantom dogs. Exit 151 afforded an easy alternate route of travel that could avoid a police operation that promised a potential for significant delay and inconvenience. Thus, there were several legitimate reasons why people might have taken exit 151, even if access to gas stations or fast-food restaurants was not one of them. There was every possibility that people taking the exit were taking it to get where they wanted to go. And within that possibility was the likelihood that some of the people were using exit 151 to ensure continued travel by avoiding the phantom roadblock — the precise motivation that we are told gives rise to an individualized suspicion that they were engaging in criminal activity. The dissent recognizes that the success of the operation cannot justify the means employed, if those means were illegal. Nonetheless, it boasts of the operation’s ultimate success at finding contraband. I view the operation’s statistics differently. First, I wonder about the need for a scorecard. Obviously, someone must have thought that the operation’s statistical percentage of success would provide the measure of its validity. Indeed, the State makes note of it in its arguments. I look at the statistics and see all of the innocent people who were treated like drug traffickers in order to meet the operation’s objective. I see people stopped, detained, interrogated, and searched by drug-sniffing dogs, without reason to support it. Since the deputies had no way to divine who was using exit 151 for a legitimate purpose and who was using it to conceal the transport of narcotics, 4 out of every 10 people whose fourth amendment right was violated belie the operation’s validity, even if we were of a mind to allow the ends to justify the means. Before a percentage of success makes any of us feel too good about what was done, we might consider how it must have felt to have an effort to get somewhere brought to a halt so that deputies could detain, interrogate, and search under a protocol that viewed every traveler as a drug smuggler. We know that anyone who exited the interstate immediately became a criminal suspect. Everyone suffered detention as a criminal suspect and interrogation as a criminal suspect. One of the several questions asked was a question about why the traveler decided to get off of the interstate. Those who simply acknowledged that their reason was to bypass the announced checkpoint and keep heading north undoubtedly discovered the ignominious experience of prolonged detention, complete with strained and heightened efforts to probe the interior of their cars and a thorough search from a drug-sniffing German shepherd and its handler. There was one reason, and one reason alone, for the deputies to consider all of these innocent travelers criminal suspects — their decision to take exit 151, the next exit after the warning of an ongoing drug probe ahead on the interstate. The dissent finds, “These drivers were stopped for questioning because the police reasonably believed that, by attempting to evade the checkpoint, they possessed drugs.” 327 Ill. App. 3d at 918-19 (Welch, J., dissenting). Of course, this view accepts the flaws inherent in this operation. First, there is nothing in particular, and, therefore, nothing reasonable, about a suspicion that everyone who decided to leave the interstate at exit 151 did so in an attempt to evade the checkpoint. More important, the warning signs possessed the ability to chase innocent, as well as culpable, travelers off of the interstate and into the snare. While the signs were intentionally vague, their design was capable of evoking widespread fear of undue delay while authorities conducted what would seemingly be an extensive operation, given its application to all interstate traffic. Hence, the prospect of an interstate roadblock complete with dog-assisted searches was something a driver could decide to forgo without raising individualized suspicion of criminal wrongdoing to a level that justified detention. Finally, there was no obligation on the part of any interstate traveler, even one who possessed contraband, to drive on and submit to a police encounter, had the phantom roadblock indeed existed. Any driver who decided to travel a different public way in order to avoid the phantom operation, whether motivated by a desire to evade perceived delay or, for that matter, by a desire to avoid indiscriminate searches of his belongings and the invasion of privacy that such searches would entail, would have made a decision entirely consistent with constitutional guarantees to which he was entitled. A conscious decision to avoid the potential indiscriminate search of which the signs warned, not unlike the refusal of a request for consent to search, would not create a reasonable suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. While the exercise of every constitutional right in the face of an official request to surrender it raises official suspicion and heightens the belief that an individual must have something to hide, the exercise of that right is not an act of evasion that authorizes its abrogation or its diminution. The State correctly points out that evasion by flight has been held to provide the degree of suspicion necessary to justify a Terry stop. IIlinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 124-25, 145 L. Ed. 2d 570, 576-77, 120 S. Ct. 673, 676 (2000). However, evasion by flight is something different from a citizen’s decision to simply avoid an encounter with the police. The flight must be unambiguous in order to provide the articulable suspicion necessary to warrant a Terry stop and detention. People v. Thomas, 198 Ill. 2d 103, 759 N.E.2d 899 (2001). Here, the act of leaving the interstate was replete with ambiguity. Even an admission that the interstate was exited for the express purpose of avoiding the announced drug checkpoint would not remove that ambiguity. The only way authorities could remove it, and determine that a given exit was indeed an act of flight designed to prevent the detection of illegal drugs, was to find illegal drugs. By that time, whoever had them, along with every other individual who decided to exit the interstate, had already been subjected to an unreasonable seizure. The only available means authorities had to remove the uncertainty inherent in every car’s approach was to view everyone as a criminal suspect: to stop them, to detain them, to interrogate them, and ultimately, to search them. In the subjective mind of the detaining officer, no one was free to leave until they passed all of the protocol’s tests. The only reason to support the seizure, detention, and interrogation was a traveler’s presence on an exit that allowed people to travel from one place to the next. Since a seizure cannot be justified by its success (Byars v. United States, 273 U.S. 28, 29-30, 71 L. Ed. 520, 522, 47 S. Ct. 248, 248-49 (1927)), the seizure in this case cannot be justified. Accordingly, I specially concur.