Brendlin, Bruce v. California (06/18/2007)

Question presented: Whether a passenger in a vehicle subject to a traffic stop is thereby "detained" for purposes of the 4th Amendment, thus allowing the passenger to contest the legality of the traffic stop?

BY ALEX ALTMAN, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Most people riding in a car stopped by police would not have the temerity to walk away from an officer as he questioned the driver. But according to the California Supreme Court, a passenger would be well within his rights to do so.

In Brendlin v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to review the California opinion and consider whether a passenger in a stopped vehicle is considered "seized," thus allowing him to protest the legality of the stop under the 4th Amendment.

The case began with a routine traffic stop on Nov. 27, 2001 in Yuba City, Calif. Noticing a brown 1993 Buick had expired registration tags, officer Robert Brokenbrough radioed to find out whether the car was in the process of securing new tags. He was told it was. A temporary permit was visible in the rear window. But, unable to tell whether the temporary permit matched the vehicle, Brokenbrough pulled the car over.

While talking to the driver, Brokenbrough thought he recognized the passenger as Bruce Brendlin who had skipped parole. Returning to his squad car, Brokenbrough verified that Brendlin had a warrant out for his arrest for a parole violation. He then returned to the Buick, ordered Brendlin out of the car, and placed him under arrest.

Searches of the car and of Brendlin himself turned up more than 12 grams of marijuana and materials used to manufacture methamphetamine.

At his trial, Brendlin filed a motion to suppress evidence gained through the searches, invoking the 4th Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures." The trial court denied his motion, finding that only the driver had been detained until Brokenbrough discovered Brendlin was a parolee at large and arrested him. Accordingly, the court said, Brendlin lacked standing to suppress the evidence seized during the search.

His motion denied, Brendlin pleaded guilty to manufacturing methamphetamine, and was sentenced to four years in prison.

In January 2004, California's 3rd District Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's decision. In the majority opinion, Judge Arthur Scotland wrote, "A common sense application of Fourth Amendment principles leads to the conclusion that a traffic stop constitutes at least a momentary seizure of everyone in the car." He continued, "By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that the passenger is free to go from the point at which the driver yields to the officer's show of authority."

Judge Scotland also noted that because the arresting officer "had at most a hunch" that the driver of the car was driving an unregistered vehicle, "he acted unreasonably and unlawfully" in making the initial stop.

To overturn the district court's decision, which it did in June, 2006, by a 4-3 split, the California Supreme Court had to clear several legal hurdles.

The first pertained to the legality of the original stop, which the appellate court had rejected. By the time it took the case, as the California court noted in its majority opinion, "the Attorney General no longer argues" that there existed "articulable suspicion" for a search.

Thus, to keep Brendlin from slipping away through the 4th Amendment's exclusionary rule, which suppresses evidence gained through unconstitutional search, the state had to show Brendlin was not actually seized by the original traffic stop, and only came under seizure when Officer Brokenbrough rightly arrested him for the parole violation.

The court also had to consider eight contrary federal appellate decisions finding that a passenger is seized along with the driver when a car is stopped, Judge Carol Corrigan wrote in her dissent.

But the greatest obstacle was U.S. Supreme Court precedent. In U.S. v. Mendenhall (1980), Justice Potter Stewart wrote that "a person has been 'seized' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment [if] a reasonable person would have believed that he was not free to leave."

In her dissent for the California Supreme Court, Judge Corrigan said Mendenhall dictates that passengers must be considered seized when a car is stopped. She pointed to a California case, County of Sacramento v. Lewis, arguing that any traffic stop renders a passenger seized: "When a police officer effects a traffic stop, a passenger's freedom of movement has been restrained by the intentional act of a government agent."

The California court circumvented Mendenhall by interpreting it narrowly. Citing California v. Hodari, Judge Marvin Baxter wrote for the majority that seizure entails "an actual taking into custody, whether by the application of physical force or by submission to the assertion of authority."

Under this definition, Brendlin had not been detained during the original stop, rather, he was only seized when the officer forcibly arrested him for violating parole. As such, the fact that the initial traffic stop was unlawful does not provide Brendlin legal cover under the exclusionary rule, since only the driver was officially seized at that time.

Some experts consider the California Supreme Court's ruling an act of legal gymnastics that defies conventional wisdom.

"It's a very narrow, technical ruling by the California Supreme Court," said Chicago-Kent College of Law Dean Harold J. Krent, adding that he hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would reverse judgment. "What the court is saying opens up a huge Pandora's Box and removes yet another check against unbridled search and seizure."

Krent doubts the newest members of the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, will be inclined to support the California court. "There's hardly a privacy issue [the last two appointees] encountered that they were sympathetic to," he said.

He noted, "the fact that [the Court] granted cert gives you some reason for optimism. They at least intend to look at the case with great scrutiny."

"How could [Brendlin] not be seized?" asked Chicago attorney Ralph Meczyk, who argued a 4th Amendment case, Caballes v. Illinois, before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004. "He's not free to go. Why wouldn't he have the same rights the driver has? His body is stopped too."

Meczyk expressed doubt that the high court would rule in favor of Brendlin.

"The Court's general trend recently has been to narrow the scope of the 4th Amendment," he said.

But on June 18, 2007, a unanimous Court held that a passenger does have a 4th Amendment right to challenge the legality of the stop.

“We think that in these circumstances, any reasonable passenger would have understood the police officers to be exercising control to the point that no one in the car was free to depart without police permission,” Justice David Souter wrote for the Court. “A traffic stop necessarily curtails the travel a passenger has chosen just as much as it halts the driver.”

Souter noted, however, that the ruling only applies to personal vehicles.

“The relationship between driver and passenger is not the same in a common carrier as it is in a private vehicle, and the expectations of police officers and passengers differ accordingly,” he explained.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which backed Brendlin, hailed the ruling.

“Today’s decision means that the police will no longer receive a free pass to violate the Constitution when they stop a car and its passengers without reason to believe that anyone in the car has violated the law,” said ACLU National Legal Director Steven Shapiro. “By recognizing that the average passenger does not feel free to leave the scene when the police pull over a car, the Court’s decision reflects commonsense.”