Court To Cops: Sucking At Your Job And Slow-Walking A Stop Means You Lose All Your Evidence

Legal Issues

from the pls-tell-me-about-yr-training-and-expertise dept

Pretextual stops. Let’s talk about it.

Cops who perform traffic stops are rarely performing traffic stops because they care about traffic safety. They’re looking for something — anything — else. Driving a car on public roads puts you on the outside of the Fourth Amendment. Warrants aren’t required. Reasonable suspicion is the low bar that has to be reached to search a car.

Then there’s a bunch of other stuff. Asset forfeiture encourages pretextual stops because rolling the dice on a traffic stop may mean walking away with a whole lot of cash. If the violation is severe enough, officers may claim the vehicle must be towed, which means they’ll get a freebie search as they “inventory” the contents of the car before handing it over to the impound lot.

The requirements are so low for warrantless searches of cars that courts have had to do a bit of double-duty to ensure the Fourth Amendment didn’t become completely irrelevant. Exploitation of this loophole finally resulted in the Supreme Court setting down a few limits with its Rodriguez decision. Cops can keep their pretense, but they must make an effort to honor it. Artificially extending the stop to engage in a fishing expedition got a little more difficult. Most importantly, it meant cops couldn’t just screw around in hopes of bringing in a drug dog to give them the reasonable suspicion they needed to perform a search.

In reality, this just means cops with K-9 s are constantly on the road, hoping to be within minutes of any pretextual stop. It also means cops have expanded their theories about suspicious behavior. Courts, to their credit, are pushing back more frequently on both tactics following the Rodriguez decision. But the fact remains that, like nearly everything else involving law enforcement, you can’t push back against the government until after it’s already locked you up.

The nice thing is that courts are far more critical of pretextual stops, especially when the officers can’t be bothered to maintain the pretense. In this case, via FourthAmendment.com, the pretense couldn’t be maintained because the officers were so incompetent they weren’t even capable of exploiting the many constitutional loopholes still available to them.

In this case, defendant Said Alan Angulo-Gaxiola got stopped and, following a lot of fortuitous bungling by officers, managed to get hit with multiple drug possession charges. The officers’ luck ran out once Said moved to suppress the evidence, but oh man, that is a trip worth taking, even if we all know what the destination is.

This is from the opening of the Utah federal court decision [PDF]:

On Saturday, March 18, 2023, near six o’clock on a sunny spring night, Sevier County Sheriff’s Deputy Bodee Wells stopped a truck Said was driving because Wells suspected its dark window tint violated Utah law. Said did not have a driver’s license but produced valid border crossing cards issued by the United States to him and his passenger, his brother Saul Angulo-Gaxiola. Said also offered that Saul had a Mexican driver’s license. But Wells did not ask for Saul’s license, or the truck’s vehicle registration, or proof of insurance.

There’s the pretext. Window tint, like the odor of marijuana, is always in the optical/olfactory senses of the beholder. All you need is a reason, and things like window tint or marijuana odor produce no evidence that can be thoroughly challenged in court. They produce nothing in terms of documents, inventories, lab results, or anything else. They are things officers claim to perceive, which limits the discussion to “your word against ours,” which is an equation that almost always favors cops.

It didn’t work here. First, there’s the immediate abandonment of the pretense by failing to ask for registration or insurance info. Then there’s Deputy Bodee Wells, who was incapable of recognizing legal documents beyond (apparently) Utah-issued drivers licenses.

The border crossing cards and the names on them confused Wells, who had only been working as a patrol officer for a few weeks. So he requested help from Sevier County Sgt. Aaron Richards.

While it’s fine to ask for help, that doesn’t keep the Rodriguez clock from ticking. Extending a stop for anything other than the reason for the stop isn’t permitted, even if it’s just to seek clarification from another law enforcement officer.

This initiated a 30-minute traffic stop that ultimately resulted in a search of the car. As the court notes, neither officer ever bothered to write up, much less issue, a citation. The window tint level was never checked. And the compound ignorance of the officers led them to conclude innocent things were “suspicious.”

The search was initiated after a third deputy showed up with a drug dog, which “quickly alerted,” according to the officers’ testimony and the court’s own depiction of the events.

Fortunately, most of this stop was documented by body camera recordings. So, if the deputies wanted to raise factual disputes, they were limited by the far more forthright depiction of the events captured by their recording devices.

Not that it mattered. The testimony immediately distanced itself from the recordings.

Trooper Wells testified he remembers it was “pretty cold” that evening, but on the body camera footage, neither Said nor any of the (what becomes four) officers on the scene is ever wearing a coat or jacket and there is no visible breath vapor. Indeed, at one point while in his patrol car, the footage depicts Deputy Wells roll down his window during a stretch he is in his car for a few minutes.

This seems minimal, but it’s actually important. One might assume (logically) that the trooper might be mistaken about the weather during a traffic stop performed weeks prior to his testimony. But that’s not the case. It’s just one of many misrepresentations by the testifying officers — you know, the sort of thing regular people call “lies.”

Wells exited his car and approached the truck on the passenger side so he would not be in the path of passing traffic. By that time, the truck’s four side windows were all rolled down. Wells testified he thought this was “kind of odd because it was cold outside,” and “people only roll down one window to speak to us,” so that raised some suspicion that the occupants were airing out the truck. Wells did not further investigate any odors, ask the occupants to roll up any windows, or ask why all the windows were down.

That’s why the officer mentioned the temperature. (I have no idea why the court switches to “trooper” when referring to Wells. The first mention of Wells in the opinion states that he is a sheriff’s deputy. I’ll just use “officer” to refer to any of the officers and the court can do whatever it wants.)

Wells asked about the window tint. Said responded that he had just had it done and was told by the installer that he could take it back if it was too dark. Said also noted he resided in Las Vegas, something Wells acknowledged by stating he didn’t know the details about window tint legality in Nevada.

However, he was pretty sure that Said offering to have the tint fixed was “out of the normal.” Then he tripped up when testifying, claiming he had not heard whether or not the passenger had a valid drivers license — something that only would have made sense if he hadn’t said “OK, so neither of you have a drivers license here?”

After being confused by the identification cards he had received from the two people in the truck, Officer Wells finally moved forward with the stop. Or, at least, sideways. He called in another officer. And then he fucked up again.

Richards asked Wells if the men spoke English, and Wells responded that one does, explaining “[o]ne says he’s from Nevada and he just picked up his friend in Mexico.” Of course, that description is inaccurate in multiple ways. Said did not state that he had “picked up” Saul in Mexico. And Said told Wells Saul was his brother, not just a friend— which would explain their identical surnames on the border crossing cards.

It wasn’t until 13 minutes into the stop that Wells bothered to run the vehicle registration past dispatch. That call confirmed the truck belonged to the man driving it: Said Alan Angulo-Gaxiola. It had been registered in Nevada, confirming Said’s earlier assertions about having the window tint installed in Las Vegas.

Once all of this happened, Wells just sat in his car, waiting for the K-9 unit he had requested. He did nothing to move forward with his stated reason for the stop: the window tint. He also did nothing to answer any unanswered questions he might have had about the men in the truck.

A whole lot more screwing around went on. The other officer on the scene asked a bunch of questions unrelated to the stop. Said again stated he would try to take care of the tint problem when he returned to Las Vegas. Some other exploratory “small talk” was initiated by Officer Richards. None of this led to anything resembling reasonable suspicion. The only problem was the supposed lack of a valid Utah drivers license. Said’s brother, Saul, gave his Mexico drivers license to the cops to run in hopes of preventing the truck from being impounded.

Even though they had nothing to work with 20 minutes into an alleged window tint violation stop, the officers dragged it out even longer. Not only that, but Richards joined Wells in lying to the court about the details of the traffic stop:

Rather than do anything related to the license, Richards then recounted to Wells his suspicions based what he thinks Said told him during his questioning:

“He told me they are going to Denver for vacation . . . first it was to work . . . then it was to vacation, visit a friend. And then it was . . . be there a week, then when you coming home? Monday.“

Of course, Said did not tell Richards he was going to Denver for vacation, or for regular work. He told Richards he was going to Denver to help a friend patch a house so the friend could paint it and prepare it to sell. And he didn’t tell Richards he would be in Denver for a week. He told him he would be there the weekend and had to be at work (at an unidentified time) on Monday in Las Vegas.

The recordings show Wells had pretty much completely abandoned the stop 23 minutes into it, ignoring everything about it while chatting to yet another officer who had arrived on the scene. No citation or warning had been issued, but it was pretty clear the brothers in the truck weren’t free to go.

And that’s where even more slow-walking of the stop occurs, solely to buy time to allow the K-9 unit to arrive.

During this time, Richards can be seen on his body camera video slowly entering the truck’s license plate information into his computer. He does this despite having obtained and reviewed the paper registration document from Said, comparing it to the truck’s VIN, and knowing dispatch already provided the return on the ‘28’ on the same license plate, and Wells told him it had come back registered to Said.

That’s just one of many ways officers try to work around the Rodriguez decision. If it looks like it’s a crucial part of a stop, hopefully it won’t be seen as unlawfully extending a stop. So, cops just do the normal traffic stop stuff slower and repeat steps as needed to drag out stops until their “probable cause on four legs” arrives on scene.

Because these officers combined ignorance (Wells and his stated inexperience) and a whole bunch of bullshit (the slow-walking and senseless redundant verification of information that had already been verified by other officers) to arrive at the conclusion they wanted (a warrantless search of the truck), the court is unwilling to allow the government to hold onto its ill-gotten evidence:

Based on the foregoing, the stop was prolonged due to unreasonable delinquency. The resulting delays caused the stop—over twenty-nine minutes from initiation to when the K-9 sniffed and alerted—to last much longer than needed to complete the traffic-based mission of issuing a citation for window tint and/or unlicensed driver and complete any needed safety checks. This violated the Fourth Amendment, and now warrants suppression of evidence and statements resulting from the stop.

The court says this whole thing could have been resolved in under 15 minutes, even if it gives credence to Officer Wells’ claims he had no idea what to do with the IDs he had received from Said and his brother. The second officer was able to verify the documents “within seconds” — something he did moments after the drug dog arrived and more than 15 minutes after his own arrival at the scene.

As for the suspicion multiple testifying officers called “reasonable,” the court says what’s captured on camera does not match the assertions of the officers. Instead, the officers (deliberately or otherwise) misrepresented statements made by Said and used these misrepresentations to justify their extension of the stop and the eventual search of the vehicle.

It’s good to see a court call out cops for attempting to route around Rodriguez with a whole bunch of bullshit. But this is just the time the cops got caught. This sort of thing happens all the time. The only reason we don’t see this handled in court more often is because most people who get fucked with by cops before being allowed to go generally don’t head right out and hire a lawyer. It’s people facing criminal charges that have the most to lose. But they’re still entitled to the same rights as the hundreds (or thousands) of drivers who have their rights violated daily by opportunistic cops.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, asset forfeiture, bodee wells, civil asset forfeiture, evidence, pretextual stops, said alan angulo-gaxiola, utah