Court Opinion

ID: 9741221
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:51:46.128549+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:22.930782
License: Public Domain

TOMLJANOYICH, Justice
(concurring).
I concur with the majority and write only to emphasize that there are two aspects to the second issue addressed by the court. The first is whether it is legitimate for a police officer as part of a routine traffic stop, and in the absence of probable cause to search, to ask the stopped driver for consent to search and to search pursuant to that consent. The second aspect of the issue is whether, if it is legitimate to ask for consent in this situation, under what circumstances will the driver’s response be sufficient to constitute voluntary consent.
Our decisions in this case and in Dezso represent what I believe will be an ongoing attempt to come to grips with the increasing use by state troopers and police officers of subtle tactics to get motorists and others to “consent” to searches. It appears state troopers and police officers are receiving training on getting “consent” to search, similar to the training sales people receive in getting people to agree to buy things they do not want. One technique is to ask the defen-' dant a question along the following lines: “You wouldn’t mind if I looked in the truck, would you?” If the person says “no,” the officer searches. Consumer protection laws provide some protection to consumers who, as a result of sales pitches from sales people, *582“consent” to purchase products they do not want. We are not dealing with vacuum cleaners in this case but with the liberty and privacy interests of all the people of the State of Minnesota, and we have an obligation to ourselves and to the Constitution of this State to do what we can, in our limited role as a court of last resort, to provide reasonable'protection to those interests. We have done this in related contexts. See, e.g., Ascher v. Commissioner of Public Safety, 519 N.W.2d 183, 187 (Minn.1994) (holding that police use of temporary roadblock to stop cars and investigate large number of drivers in the hope of discovering evidence of alcohol-impaired driving by some of them violates Minn. Const, art. I, § 10, which generally requires police to have individualized objective, articulable suspicion of criminal wrongdoing before stopping a motorist), and Matter of Welfare of E.D.J., 502 N.W.2d 779, 783 (Minn.1993) [relying on Minnesota Constitution in adhering to so-called Menden-hall/Royer standard1 in determining when a person is “seized” for Fourth Amendment purposes and in rejecting United States Supreme Court’s departure from that standard in California v. Hodari, 499 U.S. 621, 111 S.Ct. 1547,113 L.Ed.2d 690 (1991) ].
I am not prepared at this time to specify the form those protections might take. As the majority notes, we could reject the concept of consent to search in the context of routine traffic stops and so-called voluntary street encounters. A more plausible option is to extend our decision in State v. Scales, 518 N.W.2d 587 (Minn.1994) (requiring that all custodial interrogation, including the giving and the waiving of rights, must be recorded when questioning occurs in a place of detention and before then unless not feasible) to the interchange in cases like this in which the trooper or police officer seeks consent to search. Another possibility is to require that the trooper or police officer clearly inform the driver that he has a constitutional right to refuse to consent to the requested search. See Rebecca A. Stack, Airport Drug Searches: Giving Content to the Concept of Free and Voluntary Consent, 77 Va.L.REV. 183, 205-08 (1991).2 At a bare minimum, we must give heightened review of issues of-voluntary consent in this context, as we did in Dezso.
In summary, I agree with the court that all we need to do in this case is give the issue of voluntary consent the kind of heightened review we gave it in Dezso. Doing that, I agree that under the totality of circumstances the state failed to meet its burden of proving that the defendant voluntarily consented to the search.

. See Florida v. Royer, 460 U.S. 491, 103 S.Ct. 1319, 75 L.Ed.2d 229 (1983).

. The United States Supreme Court in Ohio v. Robinette, - U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 417, 136 L.Ed.2d 347 (1996) filed Nov. 18, 1996, interpreting the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, held that there is no federal requirement that a lawfully seized defendant be advised he is free to go before his consent to search will be recognized as voluntary.