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In the eight months since, courts in at least a dozen states have excused mistakes made by police who initiated stops based on a misunderstanding of what is legal and what is not, according to a canvass of court rulings. Police from California to Kansas to Illinois to New Hampshire proved ignorant of the law on items ranging from tail lights to turn signals to tinted windows to fog lines to U-turns to red lights—only to be rewarded for it, as judges, in the typical scenario, refused to throw out evidence (drugs, most often) seized as a result of the ill-founded stops.What's striking about these cases—aside from the officers' limited understanding of the laws they're entrusted to enforce—is how flimsy the pretext can be to pull someone over. The grounds cited for stopping drivers included entering an intersection when the light was yellow; or having, on the back of a car, a trailer hitch; or having, in the front of a car, an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror—you know, the ones shaped like pine trees, the ones so ubiquitous that the president of the Car-Freshner Corporation once told the New York Times Magazine : "We've sold billions of trees. Probably right up there with the number of hamburgers McDonald's sells."On VICE News: Do You Trust the Cops?
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The eventual charge : Possession of pot with intent to deliver
The case : State of Wisconsin v. Richard Houghton Jr., decided July 14, 2015, by the Wisconsin Supreme CourtWhen a police officer in the Village of East Troy (4,281 residents, 18 miles of roadways, 500 manholes, according to its quarterly newsletter) pulled over Richard Houghton's blue Ford Taurus, the officer was ignorant of the law in at least two ways. He thought the car needed a front license plate (in this case, it didn't), and he thought the car's air freshener was illegal, believing any object dangling from a rear-view mirror automatically violated the state's law on obstructing a driver's view (not so). Nonetheless, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that the marijuana and drug paraphernalia found in the officer's subsequent search of the car would not be thrown out. Just one year after it had ruled the opposite in another case, the court decided that in light of Heien, mistakes of law by police could now be forgiven, if reasonable.
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The eventual charges : Possession of pot; possession of pot with intent to deliver
The case: State of Illinois v. Jose Gaytan, decided May 21, 2015, by the Illinois Supreme CourtNear Chenoa, Illinois ("Welcome to Chenoa!," the town's website says), a couple of local police officers were using radar to check the speed of passing cars when they elected to follow a purple Lincoln Mark V. One officer later said the car's color and big tires caught his eye. The officers wound up stopping the Lincoln and arresting Jose Gaytan, a passenger, on charges stemming from marijuana found in a diaper bag.The basis for the stop was a ball-type trailer hitch. That hitch, the officers said, obscured their view of the rear license plate, in violation of the Illinois Vehicle Code. But the statute they cited says nothing of trailer hitches, and state legislators made no mention of hitches when passing the law. The statute requires keeping the license plate "free from" materials that obstruct visibility, "including, but not limited to, glass covers and plastic covers." Eyeballing a photo of the car's rear, the trial judge questioned just how much the hitch actually shielded: "The only thing it's obstructing is the little thing at the bottom that says Land of Lincoln or whatever," the judge said. More important, the Illinois Supreme Court concluded that the statute applied only to objects "physically connected" to the plate, an interpretation that excludes the trailer hitch.
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The eventual charge : Under the influence of a controlled substance
The case: People v. Felipe Campuzano, decided June 5, 2015, by the San Diego County Superior Court, Appellate DivisionWhen a couple of San Diego police officers stopped Felipe Campuzano, he was straddling a bicycle on a sidewalk, "operating it at a 'very slow, walking speed' alongside of a female companion who was walking," a court would later write. The basis for the stop—which yielded a charge of being under the influence of a controlled substance—was a municipal code that prohibits riding a bike on a sidewalk "fronting any commercial business." The law's purpose is to protect people from being hit by a bicyclist upon walking into or leaving a store. But in this case, there was no store, at least none with people. There was only a former auto-repair shop, now shuttered, surrounded by a weed-choked chain-link fence.
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The eventual charges : Possession of methamphetamine; possession of a controlled substance without a tax stamp; possession of drug paraphernalia
The case : State of Kansas v. Robert Alan Wilson, decided Jan. 16, 2015, by the Court of Appeals of KansasHere's a textbook example of a pretextual stop. At about 11 PM, a Kansas City police officer saw a Chevrolet Malibu leave a "known narcotics house." So the officer followed. He kept his tail until he saw the Malibu enter an intersection on a yellow light. "The vehicle was pretty much 50/50 on that white line" when the yellow light turned to red, the officer would later testify—and for the officer, 50/50 was good enough. He pulled the car over. After "evidently" getting the driver's consent to search ("evidently" is the Court of Appeals' word), the officer found a small glass pipe and a baggie of meth.
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