When can a police officer stop your car?

As a criminal defense lawyer in Idaho Falls and Pocatello, people will ask me when can a police officer stop my car? The truth is while it may not take much, a police officer can not stop you for just any reason.
The general rule is that if a police officer must have at least a reasonable articulable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. This rule is derived from a United States Supreme Court case, Terry v. Ohio. Consequently, this type of stop has come to be known as a Terry Stop.

A police officer is not allowed to rely solely on an unjutified suspicion. The United States Supreme Court has said exactly that; a law enforcement officer cannot rely solely on a gut feeling, or mere suspicion. A police officer is not allowed to do what you and I do every day. In order to be justified in stopping a vehicle, and detaining the person in that vehicle, he must have a reasonable and articulable suspicion.

A common example of this is weaving within a lane. Many times officers use this as a basis for stopping a vehicle. However, there are many times where the weaving within a lane is not significant enough to amount to a reasonable articulable suspicion that the driver was drunk or inattentive. Slight deviations within a lane are to be expected, and so the weaving would have to be substantial enough to amount to reasonable articulable suspicion that the person was drunk or was inattentive in his driving, since the activity of weaving itself is not illegal. Sometimes the specific facts are not instances of illegal conduct themselves, however they may lead an officer to infer that criminal activity has occurred, or is about to occur.

If an officer stops you and it is found he does not have an atriculable suspicion to do so, evidence from his stop will be supressed in court. The only time this will come up is if you have been charged with some wrongdoing and have evidence that needs to be suppressed. If you have questions about a situation you have been in, feel free to give us a call. http://www.eastidahoattorney.com/