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Improperly extended stop [NOT FINAL]

By Randall Hodgkinson

I, along with Washburn student intern Hansel Cordeiro, won in State v. Fitzpatrick, No. 96,702 (Kan. App. Jan. 25, 2008)(unpublished), reversing a Johnson County drug conviction. There were lots of claims regarding several stages of a car stop and resulting search of the back-seat passenger. The COA found that the initial stop was proper and that a fruitless intitial pat-down search of the back-seat passenger was okay, but that further detention and search was improper:

Fitzpatrick should not have been subjected to any further questioning or search. Having concluded that nothing about the encounter justifiably raised the officers' reasonable suspicion of criminal activity or necessitated further detention of Fitzpatrick for questioning, the officers' detention of Fitzpatrick after the auto search and the pat-down search of this person was an unreasonable extension of the detention and the evidence recovered thereafter should have been suppressed unless Fitzpatrick's later consent to search his pockets purged the taint of his unlawful detention. Here, the illegal detention and the request for consent were in close temporal proximity and did not purge the illegality.

I thought we had a pretty good claim on the stop itself. (And we have pretty good issues on the scope of consent as well). I guess you take a win where you can get it.

Full post as published by Kansas Defenders on January 28, 2008 (boomark / email).