Court Opinion

ID: 9522339
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:23:12.480597+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:02:34.425496
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE HEIPLE, dissenting: At approximately 10 p.m. on a street in Peoria, two young girls, ages nine and 10, were frightened by a lone man in a car who stopped and shouted at them. The stranger drove off after the girls ran away. Very soon after this incident, the girls flagged down a Peoria police officer and told him that a man in a car had stopped, asked them to come over to the car and shouted some words they could not understand. The girls pointed to a car which was moving down the street. The officer pursued and stopped the car. The driver was found to be drunk and without a valid motor vehicle registration. He was arrested and charged accordingly. The trial court found that the circumstances prior to the stop did not permit the officer to reasonably infer that the defendant had committed or had been about to commit a criminal offense so as to justify the investigatory stop which led to the arrest. The court granted the defendant’s motion to suppress the evidence arising from the arrest. The majority affirms. I dissent. An investigatory stop is proper when, based on the totality of the circumstances, the detaining officer has a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the person stopped of criminal activity. This test deals with probabilities rather than certainties. The evidence available to the officer must be seen and weighed not in terms of library analysis by scholars, but as understood by those versed in the field of law enforcement. United States v. Cortez (1981), 449 U.S. 411, 66 L. Ed. 2d 621, 101 S. Ct. 690. According to the majority, there are three reasons why the officer had no right to stop the defendant: (1) the officer did not know the girls’ identities; (2) he was relying solely on information provided by the girls and (3) the defendant drove away without doing anything else. These factors are insignificant. They do nothing to diminish the strong probability, based on the circumstances of this case as viewed by a trained police officer, that the defendant had been engaged in the offense of disorderly conduct or was about to engage in even worse activity until the girls ran away and summoned the police. The important considerations here are the nature of the girls’ complaint, their frightened demeanor, and' the fact that they specifically identified the defendant’s car which was still in sight. The two girls were nine and 10 years of age. The location was a city street. It was 10 o’clock at night. The defendant, who was a stranger, stopped his car by the two girls, asked them to come over to the car, and shouted unintelligible words to them through the car window. They were frightened. Fortuitously, a police car came along almost immediately and these two young, frightened girls flagged the police car and reported the incident to the officer. The majority seems to regard the defendant’s conduct as presumptively innocent. I do not. There is nothing presumptively innocent about a strange man in a car attempting to entice two young girls on a public street at night to approach his vehicle. Such conduct should not be taken lightly and must be investigated when brought to the attention of a police officer. I find that under these circumstances, the Cortez test permitted the officer to act immediately. He was not obliged to wait, question the girls further while the defendant drove away, and risk the possibility that the girls may not have seen the car’s license number or might not be able to describe the car from memory. This was a proper investigatory stop. The court’s order granting the defendant’s motion to suppress was manifestly erroneous and should be reversed. The suppression of evidence in this situation represents yet another instance of an overweening judicial concern for the supposed rights of the lawbreaker at the expense of the general public.