45 / 60
Y O U N G L A W Y E R S J O U R N A L
CBA RECORD
45
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.
People v. Cummings,
2014 IL 115769
(Cummings I)
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
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.
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.