Court Opinion

ID: 9522880
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:33:17.388518+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:04:12.278336
License: Public Domain

*421Skoglund, J.,
¶ 39. concurring. I agree with the result reached by the majority. However, while the majority describes the issue presented as “whether defendant was detained for too long, and with too little justification, before the canine units arrived, to pass muster under Article 11,” ante, ¶ 18, I would identify the issue as whether there was sufficient support to expand a simple motor-vehicle-violation stop into a drug investigation. I would adopt the analysis the majority applies to the facts of the May 5 and the May 17 stops, but rule that the officer did not have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of drug activity to support the enlargement of the scope of the stop. That is to say, I would hold that there was no reasonable suspicion to support the expansion of a stop for operating with a license suspended due to a failure to maintain automobile insurance — the May 5 stop — and a stop for operating with a malfunctioning brake light — the May 17 stop — into investigations involving a drug-sniffing dog and the pre-arrest detention of the motorist.
¶ 40. A traffic stop is a seizure and must be supported by a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. United States v. Sharpe, 470 U.S. 675, 682 (1985); State v. Sprague, 2003 VT 20, ¶ 17, 175 Vt. 123, 824 A.2d 539. Any challenge to the constitutionality of a stop and detention must also evaluate “whether [the subsequent investigation] was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place.” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 20 (1968); see also State v. Chapman, 173 Vt. 400, 403, 800 A.2d 446, 449 (2002) (holding that State must provide justification for expanding the scope of an investigative detention into a full-scale arrest); State v. Gray, 150 Vt. 184, 191, 552 A.2d 1190, 1195 (1988) (emphasizing that a stop was constitutional partly because “the initial stop and seizure [for DUI did not] include matters outside the original suspicion of DUI”). In Sprague, we held that any “police intrusion [must] proceed no further than necessary to effectuate the purpose of the stop.” 2003 VT 20, ¶ 17; cf. Chapman, 173 Vt. at 402-03, 800 A.2d at 449 (“An investigative detention employs ‘the least intrusive means reasonably available to verify or dispel the officer’s suspicion in a short period of time.’ ” (quoting Florida v. Royer, 460 U.S. 491, 500 (1983)). Thus, in this case, any expansion of the stop into a drug investigation required a reasonable, articulable suspicion that defendant was committing a drug-related crime. As Justice Ginsburg aptly put it in Illinois v. Caballes, “[e]ven if [a] drug sniff is not characterized *422as a . . . ‘search,’ [a] sniff surely broaden[s] the scope of [a] traffic-violation-related seizure.” 543 U.S. 405, 421-22 (2005) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (citation omitted).8 Here, there was no valid, reasonable basis for the officer’s decision to convert the processing of simple, civil, ticketed offenses into full-blown criminal investigations.
¶ 41. It is not so much the delay while waiting for the dog to appear as it is the lack of any constitutionally supportable reason to begin a criminal investigation in the first place that transgressed Article 11 here. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held in United States v. Sandoval, “knowledge of a person’s prior criminal involvement (to say nothing of a mere arrest) is alone insufficient to give rise to the requisite reasonable suspicion” to expand a traffic stop into a drug investigation. 29 F.3d 537, 542 (10th Cir. 1994). And, as the majority properly concludes, the officer’s other purported reasons for expanding the stop — as relied upon by the trial judge — fall well below any standard of reasonable suspicion and thus fail to provide sufficient justification for the expansion. I am authorized to state that Justice Johnson joins in this concurrence.

 Hence, I necessarily disagree with the dissent’s conclusion, as presumably would Justice Ginsburg, that adoption of the trial court’s theory that “[a]n officer must have a reasonable and articulable suspicion of drug activity before summoning a canine unit and allowing a traffic stop to extend into a longer investigative pre-arrest detention” is “inextricably intertwined with the question of the constitutional validity of dog sniffs.” Post, ¶ 47. I would also refrain from ruling on the constitutionality of dog sniffs.