Court Opinion

ID: 9494347
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:36:03.250502+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:22.088696
License: Public Domain

LUCERO, Circuit Judge,
with whom Judge SEYMOUR joins,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
Having joined Judge Briscoe’s opinion in its entirety, I write separately to emphasize two points. First, Officer Tucker stated in the suppression hearing that he did not “remember feeling threatened” by Holt prior to asking Holt about the presence of a loaded weapon in the car. (Appellant’s App. at 44.) Thus, the only direct evidence we have as to the officer’s particularized suspicion to justify the interrogation is that there was none. Had Officer Tucker expressed a concern about his safety, we would review to determine whether that concern was reasonable under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), and that would end the matter. Given the officer’s lack of concern for his own safety, I think it inappropriate to reach out and create law that but for the en banc nature of these proceedings would essentially be dicta.
Second, the law in this Circuit, and the eventual conclusion of the en banc court, is that traffic stops are governed by the standards laid down in Terry. See, e.g., United States v. Hunnicutt, 135 F.3d 1345, 1348 (10th Cir.1998); United States v. Anderson, 114 F.3d 1059, 1063 (10th Cir.*12391997). “[W]here [a police officer] has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual,” the officer may undertake “a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer.” Terry, 392 U.S. at 27, 88 S.Ct. 1868. Courts will defer “not to [the officer’s] inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or ‘hunch,’ but to the specific reasonable inferences which he is entitled to draw.” Id. Thus, the Supreme Court has explicitly held that, upon an articulable and reasonable belief the motorist is potentially dangerous, a police officer may search the interior compartment of the car that has been stopped. Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032, 1049-50, 103 S.Ct. 3469, 77 L.Ed.2d 1201 (1983). However, a police officer may not search a car during a traffic stop without such suspicion. Knoiules v. Iowa, 525 U.S. 113, 119, 119 S.Ct. 484, 142 L.Ed.2d 492 (1998).
Allowing the police in this case, and in all future cases in which there is no particularized suspicion, to interrogate stopped motorists as to the presence of loaded weapons is contradictory to the rule laid down in Teny. The average American citizen stopped for speeding while hurrying to drop children off at school will not only find it bizarre, but more than minimally intrusive, to be confronted with questions about loaded weapons. It seems extraordinary to me that we, as a court, are arrogating unto ourselves the right to alter the clearly established Supreme Court precedent in Terry, and are thereby eroding the constitutional rights of American citizens. If the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court is to be altered, that task belongs to the Court itself. See Thurston Motor Lines, Inc. v. Jordan K. Rand, Ltd., 460 U.S. 533, 535, 103 S.Ct. 1343, 75 L.Ed.2d 260 (1983) (per curiam); Khan v. State Oil Co., 93 F.3d 1358, 1363 (7th Cir.1996) (“[T]he Supreme Court has told the lower federal courts, in increasingly emphatic, even strident, terms, not to anticipate an overruling of a decision by the Court; we are to leave the overruling to the Court itself.” (citation omitted)).