Court Opinion

ID: 9612610
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:10:07.664884+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:42:36.926260
License: Public Domain

JOSEPH, C. J.,
specially concurring.
I have a concern that the majority opinion in this case could be the beginning point of a decisional trend to the effect that every time that a police officer believes that he has reason to fear for his own safety he may frisk everyone with respect to whom he has that fear and that the state may use as evidence anything that turns up in the course of the frisks. If that becomes an operating principle, it is very likely to overwhelm the preferable operating principle that official interference with individual freedom of movement is legally tolerable only in compelling circumstances.
Because the majority casts its decision in terms of preferences for police officers’ concerns about their safety, I write to express my view of an appropriately narrow decision which I am willing to accept. Under ORS 131.615(1), a policeman can only stop a person if he “reasonably suspects that [the] person has committed a crime.” Under ORS 131.605(5), a stop is only a “temporary restraint” and is limited for the purpose, as described in ORS 131.615(1), of making a “reasonable inquiry.” If the person stopped is then arrested as a result of the reasonable inquiry, the analysis from that point on must be based on what is permitted after the arrest of that person. If the person is not arrested as a product of the reasonable inquiry, the policeman, under ORS 131.625(1), may “frisk [the] stopped person for dangerous or deadly weapons if the officer reasonably suspects that the person is armed and presently dangerous to the officer or other person present.”
In this case, defendant was stopped within the meaning of the quoted statutes when Wight ordered her to get out of the car. For that order and the stop to have been lawful, Wight had to have had a reasonable suspicion that defendant had committed a crime. Given that the other two occupants of the car had given false information, that Wright did not know who was the owner of the car, that he did know that it did not belong to any of the people in the car and that the driver had *592been found to be armed, he had a basis for reasonable suspicion that defendant might illegally be carrying a weapon. Any suggestion that Wight’s belief that defendant was “armed and presently dangerous” in and of itself warranted the stop simply cannot be true. The statute plainly and clearly identifies the conditions precedent for a stop and then a frisk.
The legislature has decided that police authority to stop, question and search individuals is limited. I cannot agree with any suggestion in the majority opinion that police have the power to make their own rules based on subjective apprehension of danger. See Nelson v. Lane County, 304 Or 97, 104-107, 743 P2d 692 (1987). A policeman’s concern for his own safety is not the equivalent of reasonable suspicion.
Believing that defendant does not challenge anything beyond the validity of the frisk and removing the objects from her jacket, I concur in the majority’s result.
Warden, Young and Newman, Judges, join in this specially concurring opinion.