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2002 MT 326

State v. Lacasella

Montana Supreme Court

Decided December 19, 2002

Montana Supreme Court · decided 2002-12-19

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 2002-12-19

How this case has been cited

Cited by 32 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2022 · most notably Heien v. North Carolina (2014), Heien v. North Carolina (2014)

28 state decisions

170200220102020decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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JUSTICE LEAPHART

¶1dissenting.

¶2¶35 I dissent.

¶3¶36 Section 61-3-301, MCA, requires that a vehicle have the proper number of plates “conspicuously displayed, one on the front and one on the rear of the vehicle ....” The Court, relying on daytime pictures in which the plate, taped to the windshield, was visible from outside the car, concludes that there was no evidence that the plate was obscured by glare on the night in question. Finally the Court reasons that, due to Officer Dominick’s mistaken belief that a license plate had to be displayed on the bumper, he “had no reason to look at the windshield.” ¶37 “Conspicuous” is defined as follows: “Easy to notice; obvious ... noticeable.” American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992. If the license plate had been displayed in a conspicuous position, it would have been obvious and noticeable to *196Officer Dominick without his having “to look for it.” Officer Dominick’s report indicates that, “I observed that the truck had no front license plate ....” This is uncontroverted evidence that the plate was not conspicuously displayed on the night in question. Officer Dominick had particularized suspicion to initiate a stop of Lacasella’s vehicle. I would affirm the decision of the District Court.

CHIEF JUSTICE GRAY concurs in the dissent of JUSTICE LEAPHART.
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