PHOENIX — A police officer’s misunderstanding of traffic laws doesn’t provide the legal basis to pull someone over, even if they were improperly trained, the state Court of Appeals has ruled.
The judges threw out the drunken-driving conviction of Kyle Stoll, saying Cochise County sheriff’s deputies had no legal reason to pull him over in the first place. They said there was nothing wrong with the license plate light on the back of his vehicle.
Judge Michael Miller, writing for the unanimous panel, acknowledged that some white light from the light could be seen from behind the vehicle. And he agreed that the sheriff’s department had trained deputies for years that any white light on the rear of a vehicle that was not backing up was illegal.
But Miller said that’s not what the law says.
The judge said not all mistakes require a traffic stop and subsequent criminal conviction to be thrown out.
“The Fourth Amendment (prohibition against warrantless search and seizure) tolerates only reasonable mistakes of law,” Miller wrote. But he said “those mistakes must be objectively reasonable.”
In this case, the judge said, the wording of the law in this case was “unambiguous.”
“Put another way, the fact that the department had trained its officers in a way that permitted a misreading of (the law) does not make that misreading objectively reasonable,” he wrote.
The ruling sends the case back to Cochise County Superior Court Judge James Conlogue where it will have to be dismissed unless prosecutors can show another valid reason for the stop. But Miller noted that Conlogue has previously rejected two alternate theories offered.
Court records show deputies were in a convenience store when they smelled the odor of burned marijuana near Stoll and a friend. When the two men drove away, deputies followed.
They pulled over the vehicle after noting that the white lamp used to illuminate the license plate — something required under Arizona law — actually could be seen from the rear of the vehicle. That, they concluded, violated laws that said rear lights can be only red, yellow or amber.
The trial judge initially threw out the charges. But he reconsidered following a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said that a reasonable mistake of the law should not void everything that follows.
Stoll eventually was convicted.
The problem with all that, Miller wrote, is there is no way to read Arizona law to suggest that it is reasonable for a deputy to believe that the ability to see a white light from the rear of a vehicle is illegal.
He said the law clearly says that stop lamps and other signals may be red, amber and yellow, and that “the light illuminating the license plate ... shall be white.”
“Simply stated, (the law) requires only that the license plate lamp and backup lamp shall cast white light as opposed to red,” Miller wrote.
“There is no dispute that the license plate lamp on Stoll’s SUV illuminated the license plate with a white light,” the judge continued. “There was no legally correct basis for the deputy to investigate.”
In fact, Miller wrote, the whole interpretation the sheriff’s department has of the law makes no sense.
He said the way the agency is interpreting it, the law is broken if any light does not fall directly on the license plate.
“Under the state’s reading, unless a vehicle’s license plate lamp is shielded with such precision as to emit white light only onto the license plate itself and nowhere else — not even elsewhere on the rear of the vehicle, the lamp does not comply with (the law),” Miller wrote. “The state provides no authority for this reading other than the deputies’ own interpretation.”
There was no immediate response from the sheriff’s department to ask questions about the case or training of its deputies.
