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NM: RS not required for an NCIC check of vehicle tags

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Reasonable suspicion is not required to calling a license plate for an NCIC check. Suppression order reversed. State v. Herrera, 2010 NMCA 6, 2009 N.M. App. LEXIS 280 (October 30, 2009), Certiorari Denied, December 11, 2009: [*12] We agree with this reasoning of the Ninth and Tenth Circuits. Because a license plate is located in plain view, a license plate check is not intrusive, and because the United States Supreme Court has held that VIN searches are not Fourth Amendment violations because of the lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy, see Class, 475 U.S. at 118-19 (holding that "as part of an undoubtedly justified traffic stop," officers checking for the VIN in order to run a search is "sufficiently unintrusive to be constitutionally permissible in light of the lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy in the VIN"), license plate checks are not searches under the Fourth Amendment...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on February 09, 2010 (boomark / email).