Court Opinion

ID: 9721834
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 09:10:44.802623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:28.874541
License: Public Domain

WAHL, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. In my opinion the decision of the court today represents a significant departure from the “stop and frisk” doctrine as enunciated in the United States Supreme Court trilogy of cases, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968); Sibron v. New York, 392 U.S. 40, 88 S.Ct. 1889, 20 L.Ed.2d 917 (1968); Peters v. New York, 392 U.S. 40, 88 S.Ct. 1889, 20 L.Ed.2d 917 (1968), and in our own case, State v. Gannaway, 291 Minn. 392, 191 N.W.2d 555 (1971), all of which dictate a contrary result with regard to the “frisk” conducted in this case. Even granted that the officers possessed “specific and articulable facts” which justified both the stop and the frisk, a frisk is constitutionally limited to a pat-down search of the outer clothing of the suspect to discover weapons which might be used to assault the officer. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. at 29, 88 S.Ct. at 1884. It is a limited search of the person. It must be reasonably restricted in scope to the protection of the officer by disarming a potentially dangerous person. Here the officer felt no hard or dangerous object. No reasonable officer could have believed that a soda straw endangered his safety. The search should have ended here, just as this court declared that the search in Gannaway should have ended after the discovery of the corn cob pipe.
The search of the car, either before or after the finding of the soda straw in the search of defendant’s person, is not justified as a frisk. It goes beyond the constitutional definition and scope of a frisk and even if, by some stretch of the imagination, it did not, the general non-hostile atmosphere, the lack of furtive gestures by defendant prior to the search, his lack of access to the car while the investigation took place, and the seeming unconcern on the part of the police for their safety, as indicated by the chronology of their actions, all indicate that the search was not reasonably justified by a concern for the officers’ immediate safety. Without probable cause to search the car, which the officers admittedly did not possess, the seizure of the gun must fall, and with it, defendant’s arrest and the seizure of the cocaine at the station house. See Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963). As we stated in State v. Curtis, 290 Minn. 429, 437, 190 N.W.2d 631, 636 (1971), “subsequently discovered facts cannot retroactively serve to validate a search which was otherwise unlawful.”