By way of the WindyPundit, Mark Draughn raises a remarkable Georgia Court of Appeals decision in Dryer v. State.
By the officer’s own testimony, Dryer hadn’t broken any traffic laws, and the only reason he pulled Dryer over is because the officer thought it was suspicious that he had been in the lot after the club was closed. That wasn’t enough to constitute reasonable suspicion, and so Dryer’s lawyer tried to have the evidence thrown out.
You see, when the police want to ask you a few questions, one of the key legal issues is whether or not they are detaining you at the time. If they are, then they are supposed to have reasonable suspicion that you’ve done something wrong. It’s not a high standard, but it’s not nothing.
The law is that police can walk up (or drive up, as the case may be) to a person and engage them in conversation, asking them questions, just like anyone else. This is described as a tier one Terry stop, and requires no suspicion. The distinguishing hallmark of such activity is that the person is free not to engage with police and can walk away.
What makes this case remarkable, and is handled adeptly by Windy, is that Jonathon Dryer was stopped by a police officer who put on his cruiser’s blue lights, and yet the trial court held that this was a tier one stop, that Dryer was free to ignore the flashing blue lights and drive away. Don’t try this. It won’t end well. As Windy wrote:
Which means that in some lower trial court there was a judge — a fully-grown adult who I assume is mentally competent to do things like feeding himself without injury and using toilet facilities without soiling his clothes — who actually ruled at the suppression hearing that when a patrol officer flips on all those blue lights on the roof, a reasonable person would assume that he was completely free to just ignore the officer and drive away.