Court Opinion

ID: 9527901
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:35:28.346626+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:26:16.567994
License: Public Domain

DeBRULER, Justice,
dissenting.
It is written in § 11 of the Indiana Bill of Rights that: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, ..., against unreasonable ... seizure, shall not be violated; .." _ It is elementary and fully recognized by the majority opinion that the stopping of a car by the police on a public thoroughfare to investigate for crime constitutes a seizure of the driver and all other occupants of the car. In Rutledge v. State (1981), Ind., 426 N.E.2d 638, this court squared up to the issue in this manner:
Appellant contends that the police action in stopping his truck was an unreasonable seizure in violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments and Art. I, § 11, of the Indiana Constitution, and that evidence flowing from it and his attendant detention should have been excluded at trial. The stopping of a single car upon the street constitutes a physical and psychological intrusion upon the occupants of it, interferes with freedom of movement, causes inconvenience and consumes time. The show of authority is unsettling and creates substantial anxiety. Delaware v. Prouse (1979), 440 U.S. 648, 99 S.Ct. 1391, 59 L.Ed.2d 660. Even a brief stop of an automobile and detention of its occupants constitutes a seizure, and is unreasonable in contravention of the Fourth Amendment in the absence of specific articulable facts which reasonably support an inference of a violation of the laws respecting use of the vehicle. United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975), 422 U.S. 873, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 45 L.Ed.2d 607; State v. Smithers, (1971), 256 Ind. 512, 269 N.E.2d 874. In order to determine the reasonableness of such a warrantless intrusion, the court must examine the facts known to the officer at the time he stopped the car, and determine from those specifically ar-ticulable facts, and reasonable inferences from them, whether they reasonably warrant a suspicion of unlawful conduct. United States v. Brignoni-Ponce supra; Terry v. Ohio, (1968), 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889; Lawrence v. State (1978), 268 Ind. 330, 375 N.E.2d 208.
The officers expressly testified on the motion to suppress which the trial judge sustained, that they had not observed this defendant Garcia, or any of the other hundred drivers, or any of the many others who were occupants of the cars caught up in this mass detention, conduct him or herself in such a manner as to give rise to a reasonable suspicion of unlawful conduct. Indeed, the police had no other form of knowledge or information of any sort that any other individual was then upon this highway at this location and time who had violated or might be in the process of violating the law. In my opinion it is the time-honored requirement that there be an individualized, articulable suspicion of criminal intent or criminal conduct of a person, whether that person stands alone or within a group, which strikes the correct balance between the rights of citizens or groups of *164citizens and their government's interest in exercising the power to seize.
While I am not persuaded to abandon the existing standards in this situation, I believe it is important to mark recognition of the fact that the new standard spun by the majority is based upon cases of the Supreme Court of the United States, which did not involve the type of traffic offender roadblocks which we have in this case. Therefore, wholesale reliance upon them is tenuous at best. Furthermore, in Prouse, supra, the court says within the longer quotation in the majority opinion that "questioning of all oncoming traffic at roadblock-type stops is one possible alternative." Two justices concurring specially saying "... I necessarily assume that the Court's reservation also includes other not purely random stops (such as every 10th car to pass a given point) that equate with, but are less intrusive than, a 100% road block stop." This observation drew no corrective response from the majority of the court. The procedure employed in the case before us did not involve the selection of all cars or even every 10th or 25th or 50th car, but as described, five cars were pulled from the stream, and others were then waved on through until those five were fully dealt with. Then five more were pulled over, and so on. This procedure provided an opportunity more than twenty times during the two hour period of the roadblock to used non-neutral criteria in selecting the cars to be pulled off. That opportunity alone casts serious doubt about the character of this roadblock under the majority's new standard.
SHEPARD, J., concurs.