State v. Hale , 2024 Ohio 4866 ( 2024 )

[Until this opinion appears in the Ohio Official Reports advance sheets, it may be cited as State
v. Hale, Slip Opinion No. 2024-Ohio-4866.]
NOTICE
This slip opinion is subject to formal revision before it is published in an
advance sheet of the Ohio Official Reports. Readers are requested to
promptly notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of Ohio, 65
South Front Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215, of any typographical or other
formal errors in the opinion, in order that corrections may be made before
the opinion is published.
SLIP OPINION NO. 2024-OHIO-4866THE STATE OF OHIO, APPELLEE, v. HALE, APPELLANT.
[Until this opinion appears in the Ohio Official Reports advance sheets, it
may be cited as State v. Hale, Slip Opinion No. 2024-Ohio-4866.]
Criminal law—Warrantless seizure—Fourth Amendment to United States
Constitution—A passenger who has alighted from a parked vehicle may be
detained by law-enforcement officers under Fourth Amendment as part of
an investigatory stop of vehicle’s driver long enough to allow officers to
dispel any reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity officers had
for initiating the stop, and detention of the passenger may continue as facts
evolve during encounter that give officers reasonable suspicion to believe
the passenger was involved in other criminal activity—Judgment affirmed.
(No. 2023-0621—Submitted December 12, 2023—Decided October 10, 2024.)
APPEAL from the Court of Appeals for Licking County,
No. 2022 CA 00043, 2023-Ohio-1057.
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SUPREME COURT OF OHIO
DONNELLY, J., authored the opinion of the court, which KENNEDY, C.J., and
DEWINE, STEWART, BRUNNER, and DETERS, JJ., joined. FISCHER, J., dissented, with
an opinion.
DONNELLY, J.
{¶ 1} The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits
unreasonable searches and seizures, but it does not prohibit law enforcement from
undertaking brief investigatory stops based on a reasonable suspicion of criminal
activity. In this case, after plain-clothes law-enforcement officers reported
witnessing a driver commit an alleged traffic violation, a uniformed officer detained
the vehicle’s driver and passenger after the vehicle was parked and both occupants
had alighted from the vehicle. We are asked to decide whether the detention of the
passenger by the law-enforcement officer who conducted the stop, and the officer’s
search of the passenger’s purses, violated the Fourth Amendment.
BACKGROUND
{¶ 2} On August 30, 2021, plain-clothes detectives from the Central Ohio
Drug Enforcement Task Force saw Terrance Cunningham driving a gold minivan.
Cunningham was known to the task force as a suspected drug trafficker. The task-
force detectives relayed the minivan’s license-plate number and Cunningham’s
identity to Detective Benjamin Martens with the Licking County Sheriff’s Office,
who was also assigned to the task force. Detective Martens checked Cunningham’s
information in a law-enforcement database and confirmed that Cunningham did not
have a valid driver’s license. Together, Detective Martens and the task-force
detectives decided that Detective Martens should stop Cunningham’s vehicle.
{¶ 3} Using information provided to him by the plain-clothes officers,
Detective Martens located the minivan in the parking lot of a convenience store.
Detective Martens pulled into the parking lot and parked behind the minivan, which
was parked directly in front of the store’s entrance. When Detective Martens
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arrived at the parking lot, Cunningham was standing next to the minivan while
Katrina Hale, who had been a passenger in the minivan, exited the convenience
store, returned to the minivan, and leaned through the passenger’s-side window.
{¶ 4} Detective Martens asked Cunningham if he was supposed to be
driving, to which Cunningham responded that they had traveled only a short
distance and that Hale was the driver. Cunningham then pointed toward Hale, who
was leaving the passenger’s side of the minivan and trying to go back inside the
store. Detective Martens approached Hale and asked her for identification, which
she produced from one of the two clutch purses she was carrying. During this
interaction, Hale appeared nervous, claiming that she needed to vomit and asking
to return to the store. Rather than allow Hale to return to the store, Detective
Martens directed Hale to go sit on the bumper of his patrol car. As Hale grew more
agitated, Detective Martens invited Hale to place her two purses on the patrol car’s
hood. In response to Detective Martens’s questioning, Hale admitted that she knew
Cunningham did not have a valid driver’s license but that she had asked
Cunningham to drive her to the store because she was feeling ill.
{¶ 5} Next Detective Martens resumed questioning Cunningham. After
informing Cunningham that he knew Cunningham had been driving the minivan,
Detective Martens conducted a pat-down search of Cunningham, during which he
discovered a plastic bag containing a substance that Cunningham identified as
cocaine. While allowing Cunningham to finish smoking a cigarette, Detective
Martens asked Cunningham several questions, including what officers might find
when they searched the minivan. Cunningham stated that a firearm registered to
Hale was in the minivan. Once Cunningham finished his cigarette, Detective
Martens placed him in the back of the patrol car.
{¶ 6} Detective Martens then turned his attention to Hale, who was standing
at the front of the patrol car. Moving Hale’s purses—which were on the patrol car’s
hood—out of her reach, Detective Martens asked Hale whether there were any
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illegal items or any guns in the minivan. Hale admitted that her registered firearm
was in the minivan, as well as marijuana roaches. Hale also admitted to not having
a medical-marijuana card. While this discussion was ongoing, Detective Martens
searched Hale’s purses, discovering in one of them a bag containing
methamphetamines. At this point, Detective Martens informed Hale of her Fifth
Amendment rights to remain silent and to counsel. After some discussion, Hale
invoked her right to remain silent and was placed in the rear of a second patrol car.
{¶ 7} In his search of the minivan, Detective Martens discovered an
unloaded firearm in a drawer under the front passenger’s seat, two loaded
magazines (one in a bag on the floor of the front passenger’s seat and one in a bag
in the rear of the vehicle), an open container of alcohol, and a digital scale. The
Licking County Grand Jury indicted Hale on one count of aggravated possession of
methamphetamine, in violation of R.C. 2925.11(A)(C)(1)(a); one count of
aggravated possession of methamphetamine, in violation of R.C.
2925.11(A)(C)(1)(c); one count of aggravated trafficking in methamphetamine, in
violation of R.C. 2925.03(A)(2) and (C)(1)(d); and one count of improperly
handling a firearm in a motor vehicle, in violation of R.C. 2923.16(B).
{¶ 8} Before trial, Hale moved to suppress the evidence gathered during the
stop. Hale argued that because Detective Martens had lacked reasonable suspicion
to stop Cunningham, anything Detective Martens learned from his interaction with
Cunningham could not form the basis for his later detention of Hale and his search
of her clutch purses. Hale also argued that the automobile exception to the Fourth
Amendment’s warrant requirement did not apply here, because Hale was not a
passenger in the minivan when Detective Martens seized and searched her purses.
{¶ 9} After a hearing on the motion, the Licking County Common Pleas
Court found that Hale was no longer a passenger in the minivan when Detective
Martens stopped and detained Cunningham on suspicion of driving without a
license. The trial court focused on the fact that Hale was not physically in the
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minivan when Detective Martens detained her; rather, the minivan was parked and
Hale had already exited the vehicle and entered the convenience store before her
encounter with Detective Martens. Thus, the trial court reasoned, Detective
Martens had no justification for detaining Hale as part of his investigation into
Cunningham’s alleged traffic violation. As a result, the trial court granted Hale’s
motion in part, suppressing the statements that Hale had made to law-enforcement
officers during the stop and any evidence that had been discovered during the search
of Hale or her purses.1 The trial court did not answer whether Detective Martens
had justification to search Hale’s purses apart from the propriety of his detention of
Hale during the stop.
{¶ 10} A divided panel of the Fifth District Court of Appeals reversed the
trial court’s judgment. The Fifth District found that Hale remained a passenger in
the minivan when Detective Martens effected a valid stop of Cunningham for a
suspected traffic violation. 2023-Ohio-1057, ¶ 15 (5th Dist.). To reach this
determination, the appellate court relied on Hale’s being near the minivan during
her encounter with Detective Martens, her return to the minivan and reaching into
the vehicle before attempting to go back inside the convenience store, and her
admission to being a passenger in the minivan when questioned by Detective
Martens, as showing that Hale had remained a passenger of the minivan. Id. Hale’s
status as a passenger, the appellate court reasoned, allowed Detective Martens to
detain her for the duration of the stop. And as circumstances developed that
supported extending the stop, so too did Detective Martens’s justification for
detaining Hale. Id. at ¶ 15-17. The appellate court also addressed Detective
Martens’s search of Hale’s purses separately from the propriety of his detention of
Hale during the stop, concluding that the search was valid under the automobile
1. The trial court also denied Hale’s request to suppress evidence discovered through Detective
Martens’s searches of Cunningham and the minivan. That portion of the trial court’s decision is not
at issue in this appeal.
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exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Id. at ¶ 18-21. For his
part, the dissenting judge analyzed the exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s
warrant requirement and found that none of them applied here. Id. at ¶ 23-52
(Gwin, J., dissenting). And on that basis, he argued that he would have affirmed
the trial court’s judgment on the motion to suppress. Id. at ¶ 53-55 (Gwin, J.,
dissenting).
{¶ 11} Hale appealed to this court, and we accepted jurisdiction to resolve
whether Detective Martens’s seizure of Hale and his search of her purses violated
the Fourth Amendment. 2023-Ohio-2236.
DISCUSSION
{¶ 12} In this case, Hale asks us to reverse the court of appeals’ judgment
and reinstate the trial court’s order suppressing the evidence collected after she was
detained by Detective Martens. Our review of a motion to suppress presents a
mixed question of law and fact. State v. Burnside, 2003-Ohio-5372, ¶ 8. We must
accept the trial court’s factual findings if those findings are supported by competent,
credible evidence. See State v. Fanning, 1 Ohio St.3d 19, 20 (1982). But we do
not afford the trial court’s legal conclusions any deference, and we determine
questions of law de novo. See Burnside at ¶ 8.
The Fourth Amendment permits warrantless investigatory stops based on a
reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity
{¶ 13} The crux of Hale’s argument is that her detention by Detective
Martens in the convenience store’s parking lot violated her constitutional rights
under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.2 And because that
2. In her merit brief, Hale makes a glancing reference to the protection against unreasonable search
and seizure contained in Article I, Section 14 of the Ohio Constitution, and makes a brute assertion
that the stop here also violated that provision. Despite this assertion, Hale’s arguments rely entirely
on jurisprudence concerning the federal right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. As
a result, we limit our analysis to Hale’s rights under the Fourth Amendment to the United States
Constitution.
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initial stop was unconstitutional, everything that flowed from the stop—including
Detective Martens’s discovery of the methamphetamines in one of her purses—was
impermissible and should be suppressed.
{¶ 14} The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be
secure in their person, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures.” A seizure for purposes of the Fourth Amendment occurs when law
enforcement, through physical force or a display of authority, restrains a person’s
liberty of movement such that the person would believe they could not leave.
United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 553-554 (1980). Warrantless searches
or seizures are intrinsically unreasonable unless they fall into a “well-defined and
carefully circumscribed” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant
requirement. State v. Roberts, 2006-Ohio-3665, ¶ 98, citing Coolidge v. New
Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 454-455 (1971). One such exception is investigatory
stops by law-enforcement officers.
{¶ 15} “The Fourth Amendment permits brief investigative stops . . . when
a law enforcement officer has ‘a particularized and objective basis for suspecting
the particular person stopped of criminal activity.’ ” Navarette v. California, 572
U.S. 393, 396 (2014), quoting United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 417-418
(1981). This “reasonable, articulable suspicion that [a] person has been, is, or is
about to be engaged in criminal activity” acts as a sort of middle ground for the
amount of knowledge required of law-enforcement officers to justify a stop. United
States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 702 (1983). The level of suspicion must be more
than a “mere hunch” that something criminal is afoot, but it need not rise to “proof
of wrongdoing by a preponderance of the evidence”; the required standard of proof
is “obviously less than is necessary for probable cause.” (Cleaned up.) Navarette
at 397. When deciding whether reasonable suspicion existed to justify an
investigatory stop, courts look at the totality of the circumstances of the stop “to
see whether the [law-enforcement] officer [had] a ‘particularized and objective
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basis’ for suspecting legal wrongdoing.” United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273
(2002), quoting Cortez at 417.
{¶ 16} Once an investigatory stop has occurred, the detaining officer must
tailor the scope and duration of the stop to the circumstances of the encounter.
Florida v. Royer, 460 U.S. 491, 500 (1983). Thus, the investigative methods used
by law enforcement must be the “least intrusive means reasonably available to
verify or dispel the officer’s suspicion” of criminal activity. Id. Similarly, the
detention “must be temporary and last no longer than is necessary” to carry out the
stop’s purposes. Id.{¶ 17} In their briefs to this court, both parties focus on whether Detective
Martens’s detention of Hale should be considered a traffic stop and should be
subject to the Fourth Amendment analysis for those sorts of encounters. This focus
flows from the Fifth District’s conclusion that Hale was a passenger in the minivan
during a traffic stop, making her detention valid under the Fourth Amendment. See
2023-Ohio-1057 at ¶ 14-16 (5th Dist.).
{¶ 18} To be sure, the facts here cut both ways concerning whether the
encounter between Hale and Detective Martens was a “traffic stop.” In favor is the
fact that Detective Martens initiated the stop after plain-clothes law-enforcement
officers reported witnessing Cunningham commit an alleged traffic violation,
which Detective Martens confirmed when he learned Cunningham had been driving
without a valid driver’s license. On the other hand, Cunningham had parked the
minivan and Hale was no longer a passenger inside the vehicle when Detective
Martens initiated his detention of Cunningham; by that time, Hale had exited the
vehicle and entered the convenience store. But when Detective Martens detained
Hale, she’d been identified as a potential driver of the minivan and had returned to
the vehicle’s vicinity. In sum, the facts do not clearly answer whether the encounter
between Hale and Detective Martens falls within the realm of a traffic stop. But
focusing on answering that question misses the forest for the trees.
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{¶ 19} The United States Supreme Court has consistently treated traffic
stops as a form of an investigatory stop. See, e.g., Navarette, 572 U.S. at 395-396(characterizing a traffic stop as a type of investigatory stop); Kansas v. Glover, 589
U.S. 376, 380 (2020) (applying the reasonable-and-articulable-suspicion standard
when assessing a law-enforcement officer’s investigatory traffic stop). And
recently, this court noted that traffic stops should be evaluated using the standard
for brief investigatory stops. State v. Dunlap, 2024-Ohio-4821, ¶ 16 (lead opinion),
citing Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U.S. 420, 439 (1984). Irrespective of whether
Detective Martens’s detention of Hale was a traffic stop, the question before us in
assessing the stop’s constitutionality remains the same: Did Detective Martens have
a reasonable, articulable suspicion that criminal activity was afoot when he detained
Hale? And it is to that question that we now turn.
Detective Martens’s initial detention of Hale was reasonable
{¶ 20} When the circumstances of Detective Martens’s detention of Hale
are viewed in their totality, they show that Detective Martens possessed a
reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity. For that reason, Detective
Martens’s investigatory stop of Hale to confirm or dispel that suspicion was
reasonable.
{¶ 21} Let’s start at the beginning. Law-enforcement officers witnessed
Cunningham, who was known to them as a suspected drug trafficker, driving a gold
minivan. They radioed that information to Detective Martens, who checked the
relevant law-enforcement database and confirmed that Cunningham’s driver’s
license had been suspended. Yet Cunningham had been seen driving. At that point,
Detective Martens had a particularized and objective belief that Cunningham—who
did not have a valid driver’s license but had been seen driving—had committed the
crime of operating a motor vehicle without a valid driver’s license. See generally
R.C. 4510.12; see also Glover at 381-383 (facts leading a law-enforcement officer
to infer that a vehicle was being driven by an unlicensed driver are sufficient to
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support the officer’s reasonable suspicion of the traffic violation, justifying an
investigatory stop). Based on that belief, Detective Martens had the authority to
briefly detain Cunningham to confirm or dispel his suspicion of criminal activity.
See Maumee v. Weisner, 87 Ohio St.3d 295, 297 (1999), citing United States v.
Hensley, 469 U.S. 221, 231 (1985) (law-enforcement officers may rely on police
dispatches for facts to justify an investigatory stop). And that is what Detective
Martens did in the convenience store’s parking lot.
{¶ 22} It was during that valid investigatory stop of Cunningham that
Detective Martens also detained Hale. Hale argues that Detective Martens could
not detain her, because when he effected the stop, she was no longer a passenger in
the minivan—i.e., the vehicle was parked and she had exited the vehicle and entered
the convenience store. But whether Hale was still a passenger in the vehicle when
Detective Martens detained her is not dispositive of the question whether Detective
Martens had a reasonable suspicion to believe that Hale was involved in criminal
activity. Rather, the dispositive question is whether the facts that Detective Martens
possessed when he stopped Hale provided a reasonable basis for his suspicion. See
Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21-22 (1968), citing Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S.
132 (1925), and Beck v. Ohio, 379 U.S. 89, 96-97 (1964). And we conclude that
they did.
{¶ 23} After being lawfully stopped by Detective Martens, Cunningham
claimed that Hale had been driving the minivan and pointed toward her. When
Detective Martens approached Hale, she was in the vicinity of the minivan. Indeed,
the dashboard-camera video footage from Detective Martens’s patrol car shows that
Hale had exited the convenience store, leaned into the minivan’s passenger’s-side
window, and retrieved items from or replaced items in the minivan while Detective
Martens spoke with Cunningham. Far from being a dispassionate and unrelated
observer to what was going on, Hale actively associated herself with and exercised
control over the vehicle that was at the center of the suspected criminal activity.
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What is more, evidence at the hearing on Hale’s motion to suppress shows that Hale
was walking from the minivan and attempting to go back inside the convenience
store when Detective Martens stopped her to investigate her involvement in the
suspected criminal activity that precipitated his stop of Cunningham. At that point,
given Cunningham’s assertions that Hale had been the person driving the minivan
and Detective Martens’s own observations, Detective Martens possessed facts that
supported his suspicion that Hale was involved in suspected criminal activity.
{¶ 24} This suspicion was bolstered by Detective Martens’s continued
interaction with Hale. In response to Detective Martens’s questioning, Hale
admitted that she knew Cunningham did not have a valid driver’s license and that
despite that knowledge, she still asked him to drive her to the store. This admission
by Hale gave Detective Martens reasonable suspicion to believe that Hale had
wrongfully entrusted a motor vehicle to an unlicensed driver. See R.C.
4511.203(A)(1) (prohibiting a person who owns or controls a motor vehicle from
knowingly entrusting it to another person who does not have a valid driver’s
license). The discovery of these facts allowed Detective Martens to extend Hale’s
detention so that he could investigate his additional suspicions of criminal activity.
See State v. Robinette, 1997-Ohio-343, ¶ 27 (law-enforcement officers may extend
investigatory stops after obtaining additional facts that give rise to a suspicion of
criminal activity that warrants further investigation).
{¶ 25} Applying the law to the facts here shows that Detective Martens’s
actions satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s touchstone for search and seizure—
reasonableness. See Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398, 403 (2006), citing Flippo
v. West Virgina, 528 U.S. 11, 13 (1999), and Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347,
357 (1967). The purpose of the investigatory stop was for Detective Martens to
confirm or dispel law enforcement’s reasonable suspicion that the minivan was
being driven illegally. That was more than enough justification for Detective
Martens to detain Cunningham, the suspected driver, and it was enough for
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Detective Martens to detain Hale once she was identified as a possible driver of the
minivan while the detective investigated the suspected criminal activity.
Furthermore, the facts that show Hale was associating herself with and exercising
some control over the minivan when Detective Martens first approached her.
Indeed, even if Hale had exited the vehicle and entered the convenience store while
Detective Martens detained and questioned Cunningham, the fact remains that Hale
had returned to the vehicle, leaned inside it, and was walking away from the vehicle
when she was detained by Detective Martens. These circumstances provided a
reasonable basis for Detective Martens to detain Hale. And as a result, Hale’s
detention by Detective Martens did not violate the Fourth Amendment.
We do not reach the constitutionality of Detective Martens’s search of Hale’s
purses
{¶ 26} In her sole proposition of law, Hale alleges that Detective Martens’s
seizure and search of her two purses also violated the Fourth Amendment. But the
only argument Hale provides in support of that claim flows from her challenge to
the constitutionality of the investigatory stop: she asserts that because she was
improperly detained during Detective Martens’s investigatory stop, any evidence
found in her purses during that detention “must be excluded as the fruit of a
constitutional violation.” She provides no separate basis for us to assess the
constitutionality of Detective Martens’s search of her purses.
{¶ 27} An appellate court addresses and resolves legal error as presented
and argued by the parties. State v. Quarterman, 2014-Ohio-4034, ¶ 19. It is not the
court’s task to formulate and resolve a party’s legal arguments for her. Id. In the
proceedings before the trial court and the Fifth District, Hale asserted that Detective
Martens’s search of her purses violated the Fourth Amendment on grounds other
than the alleged unconstitutionality of the initial stop. Yet she chose not to include
those arguments in her briefing here and failed to develop them—even expressly
disclaiming them—during oral argument when prompted by this court’s
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questioning. The only argument she makes is that the evidence found during the
search of her purses is the fruit of an unconstitutional stop. As discussed above,
however, Detective Martens’s detention of Hale did not violate the Fourth
Amendment. As a result, we make no comment about whether the detective’s
search of Hale’s purses during the stop was unconstitutional.
CONCLUSION
{¶ 28} Nothing in this case leads us to believe that Detective Martens’s
detention of Hale as part of his investigatory stop after plain-clothes officers
reported witnessing Cunningham commit an alleged traffic violation is
unreasonable. As a result, Detective Martens’s seizure of Hale was not an
unconstitutional investigatory stop and therefore did not violate the Fourth
Amendment to the United States Constitution. And given Hale’s failure to argue in
her briefs to this court any other grounds on which Detective Martens’s search of
her purses might have violated the Fourth Amendment, we decline to discuss
whether that search was unconstitutional. Thus, we affirm the judgment of the Fifth
District Court Appeals reversing the trial court’s judgment granting Hale’s motion
to suppress.
Judgment affirmed.
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FISCHER, J., dissenting.
{¶ 29} The majority opinion holds that the Fourth Amendment to the United
States Constitution allows law-enforcement officers to seize recent passengers of
vehicles when the driver was stopped on suspicion of driving with a suspended
license, because those officers have reasonable suspicion to believe that the
passengers were involved in criminal activity. Because this holding runs afoul of
the Fourth Amendment, I respectfully dissent.
{¶ 30} The Fifth District Court of Appeals treated this case as involving a
traffic stop and stated that under the circumstances of the traffic stop, officers could
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detain appellant, Katrina Hale, if she was considered a “passenger of the vehicle.”
2023-Ohio-1057, ¶ 15 (5th Dist.). The court of appeals concluded that Hale was a
passenger of the vehicle because the vehicle was parked directly in front of the
convenience store where the stop took place; the officer’s body camera recorded
Hale exiting the store, returning to the vehicle, and reaching into the passenger’s
side of the vehicle before trying to return to the store; and Hale “was at or very near
the vehicle” at all times pertinent to the stop. Id. Furthermore, Terrence
Cunningham, who had been seen driving the vehicle, told Detective Martens—the
officer who initiated the stop—that Hale had been driving the vehicle, and upon
questioning, Hale admitted that she had been a passenger in the vehicle. Id.{¶ 31} The majority opinion states that analyzing whether the stop in this
case was a traffic stop “misses the forest for the trees,” majority opinion, ¶ 18,
because traffic stops are a form of investigatory stop, id. at ¶ 19. Therefore, the
majority opinion concludes that what matters here is whether Hale’s detention was
proper under the requirements for investigatory stops and whether Detective
Martens had “a reasonable, articulable suspicion that criminal activity was afoot
when he detained Hale.” Id. at ¶ 19.
{¶ 32} The majority opinion concludes that Detective Martens did have a
reasonable suspicion of some sort of unspecified criminal activity to justify his
seizure of Hale because when he arrived in the parking lot to initiate the stop, Hale
“was walking from the minivan and attempting to go back inside the convenience
store,” id. at ¶ 23, and because Cunningham asserted that Hale had been driving the
minivan, id. at ¶ 23. But the majority opinion never says what kind of criminal
activity Detective Martens reasonably suspected of Hale at that time, and that is for
good reason. Reaching into a vehicle and then returning to a convenience store is
not a crime, nor is it indicative of any crime. And if Hale had been the one driving
the minivan as Cunningham claimed, then there was no crime to investigate.
Detective Martens initiated the stop because law-enforcement officers suspected
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Cunningham of driving with a suspended license. Therefore, there were two
possibilities here: either Hale had been driving, which was not a crime, or
Cunningham had been driving with a suspended license while Hale was a
passenger. But it is not a crime to ride in a vehicle being driven by someone with
a suspended license.
{¶ 33} The majority opinion suggests that perhaps Detective Martens had a
reasonable, articulable suspicion to believe that Hale had engaged in negligent
entrustment because she stated that she had asked Cunningham to drive her to the
store. But Hale did not inform Detective Martens of that fact until after Detective
Martens detained her and told her that she was not free to leave. And regardless,
Detective Martens had no reason to believe that Hale knew Cunningham’s driver’s
license was suspended or that Hale owned or had control over the minivan that
Cunningham had driven. See R.C. 4511.203(A)(2) (“No person shall permit a
motor vehicle owned by the person or under the person’s control to be driven by
another if . . . [t]he offender knows or has reasonable cause to believe that the other
person’s driver’s or commercial driver’s license . . . [has] been suspended . . . . ”).
Therefore, Detective Martens did not have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that
Hale had participated in any sort of criminal activity, so this was not a proper
investigatory stop of Hale, and the only way the stop could be justified under the
Fourth Amendment is if it was a traffic stop and Hale was still a passenger in the
vehicle.
{¶ 34} But this was not a typical traffic stop. The vehicle was already
parked in the convenience store’s parking lot and both Cunningham and Hale had
already exited the vehicle when Detective Martens and other law-enforcement
officers arrived on the scene. In fact, Hale was coming out of the convenience store
when Detective Martens pulled into the parking lot. As discussed below, while
courts have held that law-enforcement officers may legally order passengers of a
lawfully stopped vehicle to get out of the vehicle under certain circumstances, no
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court that I am aware of, other than the Fifth District in this case, has ever held that
officers may detain people who have been recent passengers in a vehicle that was
already parked when officers arrived.
{¶ 35} In Maryland v. Wilson, 519 U.S. 408, 414-415 (1997), the United
States Supreme Court held that law-enforcement officers may order passengers out
of a vehicle during a traffic stop to protect officer safety. However, the Court noted
that passengers have a stronger liberty interest than drivers because while the officer
making the stop has probable cause to believe the driver has committed a vehicular
offense, there is no probable cause to believe that the passenger has committed a
crime. Id. at 413. The court stated that therefore, “there is no such reason to stop
or detain the passengers,” id., but held that because passengers are already detained
by virtue of the traffic stop, id. at 414, ordering them to exit the vehicle is a
“minimal” additional intrusion that is warranted by the interest in officer safety, id.
at 415.
{¶ 36} However, the Court’s reasoning in Wilson does not extend to people
who were recent passengers of a vehicle that was already parked when officers
arrived. Unlike in a true traffic stop that occurs along a roadway, recent passengers
of a parked vehicle have not been “already stopped” by law enforcement, id. at 414.
Therefore, any additional intrusion by an officer in detaining a recent passenger of
a parked vehicle is not “minimal.” Furthermore, the interest in officer safety is not
nearly as strong when a recent passenger has left a vehicle and gone inside a retail
establishment. If officer safety could justify an officer’s detaining a recent
passenger of a vehicle who is attempting to reenter a retail establishment, then it
could justify the officer’s detaining everyone inside that retail establishment merely
because officers are conducting a traffic stop in the parking lot outside. That cannot
be and is not the case. The circumstances in Wilson that justified allowing officers
to order a passenger out of a vehicle are simply not present in this case, because
here, the vehicle was already parked at a retail establishment and the passenger was
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January Term, 2024
outside the vehicle and attempting to reenter the store.
{¶ 37} Furthermore, while officers may detain passengers of a vehicle to
protect officer safety, that exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth
Amendment is inapplicable here because Hale was not jeopardizing officer safety
in any way. Unlike the stop at issue in Brendlin v. California, 551 U.S. 249, 258
(2007), in which the United States Supreme Court held that officers may detain
passengers of a vehicle who are jeopardizing officer safety, Cunningham’s vehicle
was not stopped along the road. His vehicle was parked in the parking lot of a
convenience store when Detective Martens initiated the stop, and Hale had already
gotten out of the vehicle, gone inside the store once, returned to the vehicle, and
was attempting to go back inside the store when Detective Martens detained her.
Far from moving around the scene jeopardizing officer safety, Hale actually asked
that she be allowed to leave the scene. This is not the situation that was
contemplated by the Court in Brendlin.
{¶ 38} Nor was Hale exercising control over a “center of suspected criminal
activity” as the majority opinion suggests. See majority opinion at ¶ 23. In Arizona
v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332, 335 (2009), the United States Supreme Court held that law-
enforcement officers may not search a vehicle if they do not have probable cause
to believe that they will find evidence of the suspected crime in the vehicle. In that
case, as in this case, the driver of the vehicle was suspected of driving with a
suspended license. The Court held that the driver’s arrest for driving with a
suspended license did not justify the officers’ search of the vehicle, because it was
not reasonable to believe that evidence of the offense of arrest would be found in
the vehicle. Id.{¶ 39} Likewise in this case, when Hale was detained, Detective Martens
had reasonable suspicion to believe that Cunningham had been driving without a
valid license. But there would be no evidence of that offense in the vehicle.
Therefore, Detective Martens did not have a right to search the vehicle during
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SUPREME COURT OF OHIO
Hale’s detention, and he did not have any reason to believe that Hale was removing
evidence of a crime or meddling with a crime scene. Hale had every right to remove
her belongings from the vehicle when she did. Furthermore, even if Detective
Martens had reason to believe that Hale was meddling with a crime scene, which
he did not, he could have ordered her to stop what she was doing short of actually
detaining her. Then, if she had continued her actions, it would have been reasonable
for Detective Martens to detain her at that point, but not before.
{¶ 40} Hale’s detention was not a traffic stop. It was not an investigatory
stop. Detective Martens had no reason to believe that allowing Hale to leave the
scene would jeopardize officer safety or the integrity of a crime scene. In short,
Hale’s detention violated the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Therefore, I dissent and would reverse the decision of the Fifth District Court of
Appeals.
__________________
Jenny Wells, Licking County Prosecuting Attorney, and Kenneth W. Oswalt,
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, for appellee.
Elizabeth R. Miller, Ohio Public Defender, and Craig M. Jaquith, Assistant
Public Defender, for appellant.
__________________
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