CBA Record

Y O U N G L A W Y E R S J O U R N A L

Three recent cases in the Illinois Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court— People v. Cummings , 2014 IL 115769 ( Cummings I ), Rodriguez v. United States , 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015), and People v. Cummings, 2016 IL 115769 ( Cummings II )— deal with the length of time that an officer may delay a stop when investigating crimes unrelated to the initial reason for a traffic stop. While these cases place important limits on the amount of time that a police officer can detain a driver in order to conduct such unrelated inquiries, they also provide time for an officer to complete the purpose of the stop and to conduct other “ordinary inquiries” such as checking the driver’s license or determining whether the driver has outstand- ing warrants, even if the officer lacks any suspicion that the driver is unlicensed or has an outstanding warrant.

T HESE CASES HIGHLIGHT THE ways in which courts must strike a balance between the government’s interest in protecting police officers— whose safety is peculiarly at risk during traffic stops—and private citizens’ privacy interests—which may be invaded when the police begin a line of investigation that has nothing to do with the initial reason for the stop. Derrick Cummings was driving a van owned by a woman named Pearlene Chat- tic, who had a warrant out for her arrest. A police officer pulled the car over and saw that Cummings, a man, was driving. The officer knew Chattic was a woman—and that Cummings could not be Chattic— but still asked Cummings for his driver’s license. Cummings could not produce one, however, as his license had been suspended. He was arrested and charged with driving on a suspended license. The Illinois Supreme Court held that the police officer’s request for Cummings’s license “impermissibly prolonged the stop because it was unrelated to the reason for the stop.” Stating that “the reasonableness People v. Cummings, 2014 IL 115769 (Cummings I)

of a traffic stop’s duration [is linked] to the reason for a stop,” the court concluded that, because the officer had no reason to believe that Cummings was Chattic once he realized that the van’s driver was a man, the officer’s request for Cummings’s license unreasonably prolonged the stop. The court expressly overruled those cases, hold- ing that a police officer may always request identification during a traffic stop, even if he lacks a reasonable, articulable suspicion to continue the stop. Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015) Shortly after Cummings I was decided, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Rodriguez v. United States , 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015), which also addressed the permissible length of an investigation that is unrelated to the initial purpose of a traffic stop. In Rodriguez , the officer pulled over the defendant because he had seen the defendant’s car slowly veer onto the shoulder of a Nebraska highway, then jerk back onto the road. After the officer had run a records check on the defendant and written him a warning, the officer asked for permission to walk a drug-sniffing dog around the car. The defendant said the

officer could not, but the officer ordered the defendant out of the car and performed the sniff anyway. The dog alerted to the presence of drugs, leading to the recovery of methamphetamine in the car. The dis- trict court and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the seven or eight minutes it took to perform the dog sniff did not constitute an unreasonable delay, and that the sniff itself was a minor intrusion on the defendant’s liberty. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. The Court stressed that traffic stops may last no longer than the time the officer needs to complete the purpose of the stop. While acknowledging that a police officer could permissibly perform “unrelated checks” during the stop, the Court held that the officer could not do so “in a way that pro- longs the stop.” Thus, much of the Court’s analysis in Rodriguez seems to support the outcome in Cummings I . Like Cummings I , Rodriguez closely ties the permissible length of a traf- fic stop to the reason for the traffic stop. Both cases stated that, if the police detains a person once the reason for the stop is complete, then that delay is unreasonable, even if it is only a few minutes.

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