State v. Correa

               THE UTAH COURT OF APPEALS

                        STATE OF UTAH,
                           Appellee
                              v.
                    SERGIO GIOVANI CORREA,
                          Appellant.

                            Opinion
                       No. 20220313-CA
                       Filed May 9, 2024

           Fourth District Court, Heber Department
              The Honorable Jennifer A. Mabey
                        No. 205500004

        Wendy M. Brown, Debra M. Nelson, and Benjamin
               Miller, Attorneys for Appellant
                 Scott H. Sweat and McKay King,
                      Attorneys for Appellee

    JUDGE RYAN D. TENNEY authored this Opinion, in which
     JUDGES RYAN M. HARRIS and AMY J. OLIVER concurred.

TENNEY, Judge:

¶1     Sergio Giovani Correa appeals the denial of a motion to
suppress evidence that was obtained during an investigatory
stop. This appeal asks us to decide whether an officer’s
knowledge that Correa did not have a valid driver license two
months before the stop created a reasonable suspicion that Correa
still didn’t have a valid license and was therefore driving
impermissibly. We hold that it did not. We accordingly reverse.
                           State v. Correa


                         BACKGROUND 1

¶2     Late in the evening of January 30, 2020, a white truck was
pulling onto a highway near Heber City when it passed an officer
(Officer) who was out on patrol. As the vehicles passed each other,
the “driver looked at” Officer and then “quickly looked away.”
Officer made a U-turn and began following the truck.

¶3     While following the truck, Officer ran its license plate
through a police database. From this search, Officer learned the
owner of the truck was a female but “that in recent history a
Hispanic male name[d] Sergio Correa had been operating that
vehicle without a license” and “that he’d been recently stopped
and cited for it.” Officer later clarified that by “recent,” he meant
“in the last two months,” and he agreed that the offense could
have been as far back as three months. As Officer continued to
follow the truck, he tried “to get more information from dispatch
[and] from other officers.” During these efforts, Officer tried to
pull up a photograph of Correa. Before he was able to pull up the
photograph, however, the truck pulled into the parking lot of an
apartment complex. At that moment, Officer had only been
behind the truck “for a very short period” of “maybe two
minutes,” and he did not yet know who the driver was.

¶4     Officer followed the truck into the parking lot and parked
nearby. When the driver exited the truck and “started to go into
[the] apartment complex,” Officer got out of his vehicle too, and
he activated his overhead lights “as [he] was exiting” his vehicle.
Officer then approached the driver on foot and engaged him in
conversation. During that conversation, Officer learned that the
driver was indeed Sergio Correa and that he did not have a valid


1. “In reviewing the trial court’s ruling on a motion to suppress,
we recite the facts in the light most favorable to the trial court’s
findings.” State v. Fullerton, 

, ¶ 4 n.1, 

(quotation simplified).


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                           State v. Correa


driver license. During the remainder of the conversation and an
ensuing investigation, Officer obtained evidence that Correa was
under the influence of drugs and was also in possession of both
drugs and drug paraphernalia.

¶5     Based on this evidence, Correa was later charged with
three counts of possession or use of a controlled substance, one
count of driving with a measurable controlled substance in the
body, one count of possession of drug paraphernalia, and one
count of driving on a denied license.

¶6     Correa subsequently filed a motion to suppress “all
evidence collected in this case, including officer observations,
statements by the defendant, and chemical evidence taken from
the defendant and its laboratory analysis.” Correa argued that this
evidence should be suppressed because he had been detained by
Officer without reasonable suspicion, thus violating the Fourth
Amendment.

¶7     Officer later testified at a suppression hearing. In his
testimony, he confirmed that he had not “observe[d] any traffic
violations, any infractions, or misdemeanors” at the time that he
turned on his lights and approached Correa. When asked why he
activated his lights and approached Correa, Officer responded: “I
had an individual who matched the description of somebody who
had been operating the vehicle in the past who did not have a
license. He was leaving the area, [and] I wanted to make contact
with him to determine his identity.”

¶8      At the close of the hearing, the court issued an oral ruling
denying the motion to suppress. The court expressed its view that
although Officer “didn’t recognize” Correa offhand, his
“[k]nowledge that someone by the name of Mr. Correa had been
driving that vehicle without a license fairly recently” was
“enough to meet the minimum standard” to justify an
investigatory stop. The court also opined that “licensing issues
[are] often a situation where the condition . . . extends,” so “if you


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                           State v. Correa


know someone’s driving without a license . . . there is some
likelihood that if you see them driving a vehicle, that perhaps
they’re driving again without a license.”

¶9     Correa later pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing a
controlled substance and one count of impaired driving, but he
reserved the right to appeal the denial of his motion to suppress.


              ISSUE AND STANDARD OF REVIEW

¶10 Correa argues that the district court erred in denying his
motion to suppress. We “review a district court’s ruling on a
motion to suppress for an alleged Fourth Amendment violation
as a mixed question of law and fact.” State v. Hebeishy, 

, 

. “Specifically, we review the court’s
factual findings for clear error, and we review its legal
conclusions, including its application of law to the facts of the
case, for correctness.” 

                            ANALYSIS

¶11 The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
affirms that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures, shall not be violated.” Under the Fourth Amendment, it
“is settled law that a police officer may detain and question an
individual when the officer has reasonable, articulable suspicion
that the person has been, is, or is about to be engaged in criminal
activity.” State v. Alverez, 

, 

 (quotation
simplified); accord Kansas v. Glover, 

 (2020)
(“Under this Court’s precedents, the Fourth Amendment permits
an officer to initiate a brief investigative traffic stop when [the
officer] has a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the
particular person stopped of criminal activity.” (quotation
simplified)).



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                          State v. Correa


¶12 On appeal, Correa argues that Officer did not have
reasonable suspicion that he was engaging in criminal activity
before Officer detained him. We agree. Before explaining why,
however, we briefly note two threshold questions that were
briefed and argued but that we ultimately do not decide.

¶13 The first threshold question is when the seizure in this case
occurred. Correa claims that he “was seized for purposes of the
Fourth Amendment when [Officer] turned on his overhead
lights.” The United States Supreme Court has recently clarified,
however, that “a seizure by acquisition of control” involves
“either voluntary submission to a show of authority or the
termination of freedom of movement.” Torres v. Madrid, 

 (2021); see also California v. Hodari D., 

(1991). Here, even if we accept Correa’s assertion that Officer
made a “show of authority” when he turned on his lights, the
record remains unclear as to whether Correa submitted at that
moment or whether Correa instead only submitted when Officer
approached him on foot and began the conversation. In any event,
the State has not disputed Correa’s implicit agreement that he was
at least seized by the time the conversation began. And the record
contains no indication that Officer learned anything of
significance in between turning on his lights and beginning the
conversation. For purposes of our analysis, we’ll accordingly
focus on whether Officer had reasonable suspicion at the time that
the conversation began. 2



2. Along these same lines, we note that while Correa and the State
have both referred to the interaction at issue as a “traffic stop,”
Officer testified that he did not “pull [Correa] over” and that
Correa had already parked and started walking toward the
apartment complex when Officer turned on his lights. As a result,
this case does not involve a “traffic stop” as that term is commonly
understood. Instead, what’s at issue is a seizure that occurred at
some point after Correa was on foot.


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                            State v. Correa


¶14 The second threshold question is whether Officer had a
reasonable basis for suspecting that the driver he saw in the white
truck was the same “Sergio Correa” from the prior incident that
Officer had learned about through the records search he
conducted while following the truck. This question matters
because the justification for the subsequent seizure was Officer’s
suspicion that (i) this driver was the same Sergio Correa and
(ii) Correa still did not have a valid driver license. In the briefs and
again at oral argument, the parties disputed whether Officer had
enough information to suspect that this was the same person, and
they also disputed whether ethnicity played an inappropriate role
in this suspicion. In Correa’s view, Officer engaged in
impermissible racial profiling. In the State’s view, however,
Officer more benignly used ethnicity as a descriptive identifier to
facilitate comparison with a known suspect.

¶15 We need not resolve this question either. For purposes of
our analysis, we’ll assume that Officer did have a reasonable and
non-discriminatory basis for suspecting that the driver of this
truck was the same Sergio Correa from the prior incident. But
even with that assumption, we still conclude that the seizure was
unlawful because Officer did not have a reasonable basis for
suspecting that Correa was currently engaged in criminal
behavior.

¶16 The justification given by the State and accepted by the
district court was that Officer reasonably suspected that Correa
was driving without a valid driver license. Indeed, on this front,
the State first asserts that Officer had more than a mere suspicion.
In its brief, the State argues that Officer “did, in fact, know the
status” of Correa’s driver license before he detained Correa.
(Emphasis added.)

¶17 To support this argument, the State points to a moment in
the suppression hearing in which Officer testified that “at the time
[he] made personal contact” with Correa, he “knew the driver’s



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                           State v. Correa


license status of Sergio Correa.” But when read in context, that
statement is less definitive than the State suggests.

¶18 At the suppression hearing, Officer said that he was able to
follow the white truck for only “a very short period” of “maybe
two minutes” before the vehicles pulled into the parking lot.
Officer also testified that, during this “very short period,” he had
the “opportunity to run his license.” In response to a clarifying
question, however, Officer said that he ran a check on “the license
plate on the vehicle, not [Correa’s] driver’s license.” Officer then
testified that during the brief period in which he was following
the truck, he tried “to get more information from dispatch [and]
from other officers.” As part of these efforts, Officer tried to pull
up a photograph of Sergio Correa. But by Officer’s own account,
he was unable to successfully “pull[] up a photograph of Mr.
Correa” before the vehicles pulled into the parking lot and the two
men engaged in conversation on foot. Aside from the records
search on the truck, Officer never said that he completed any other
records search.

¶19 Consistent with the information he apparently received
from the search on the truck (which, again, informed him of an
incident that had occurred about two months earlier), Officer
repeatedly described his knowledge of Correa’s license-status in
past-tense terms. In one exchange, for example, Officer testified
that he “knew that in the recent history a Hispanic male name[d]
Sergio Correa had been operating that vehicle without a license;
that he’d been recently stopped and cited for it.” (Emphases
added.) In another exchange, Officer testified that the driver he
saw on the road “matched the description of somebody who had
been operating the vehicle in the past” without a license.
(Emphasis added.) This is also similar to how Officer described
the same events in the probable cause statement that he wrote and
signed on the day that he arrested Correa. There, Officer said that
as he was following the truck, he ran a “records check of the
[truck’s] license plate” and that this records check showed that the



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                          State v. Correa


truck “had been recently operated by a male driver that did not
have a valid license,” and he further said that he then “attempted
to pull a [Driver’s] License picture of the recently offending
driver.” (Emphases added.)

¶20 From all this, it seems clear enough that when Officer said
that he “knew the driver’s license status of Sergio Correa,” what
he was referring to was his knowledge that the previously cited
Sergio Correa did not have a license when he was pulled over in
that truck about two months earlier. We see no place in the record
where Officer ever said that he had managed to obtain any
updated knowledge about Correa’s driver license status before
detaining him, much less where Officer explained how he
obtained such knowledge during the very short period of time
that was available to him. And of some note, the district court did
not find that Officer had any updated knowledge either. To the
contrary, after having heard the testimony at the suppression
hearing firsthand, the court concluded that although Officer
“didn’t recognize” the driver, Officer’s “[k]nowledge that
someone by the name of Mr. Correa had been driving that vehicle
without a license fairly recently” was “enough to meet the
minimum standard” for an investigatory stop. And the court
further reasoned that “if you know someone’s driving without a
license, that there is some likelihood that if you see them driving
a vehicle, that perhaps they’re driving again without a license.”
From this, it seems that the court also thought it needed to draw
an inferential link between Officer’s knowledge of Correa’s past
driver license status and his mere suspicion about Correa’s
current driver license status.

¶21 We’ll accordingly view Officer’s testimony the same way
that the district court did: that what Officer knew was that Sergio
Correa did not have a driver license two months earlier. From
here, however, we part ways with the district court on the
question of whether this justified the seizure.




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                          State v. Correa


¶22 The Fourth Amendment does not protect “against all
searches and seizures, but only against unreasonable searches and
seizures.” State v. Goddard, 

, 

(emphases in original, quotation otherwise simplified). In this
sense, the “touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is
reasonableness.” 

 (quotation simplified). And when assessing
reasonableness in a Fourth Amendment inquiry, courts seek to
“balance[] the nature and quality of the intrusion on personal
security against the importance of the governmental interests
alleged to justify the intrusion.” State v. Hubbard, 

 (Utah Ct. App. 1993) (quotation simplified).

¶23 As noted, an investigatory detention is permitted if an
“officer has reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person has
been, is, or is about to be engaged in criminal activity.” State v.
Alverez, 

 (quotation simplified). And an “officer’s
suspicion is reasonable if it is supported by specific and
articulable facts as well as any rational inferences drawn from
those facts.” 

¶24 No one disputes that, about two months earlier, Correa
drove the truck without a license. But Correa had already been
cited for doing so, and that past incident was now over. Also, as
indicated above, Officer confirmed at the suppression hearing
that he had not “observe[d] any traffic violations, any infractions,
or misdemeanors” at the time that he turned on his lights and
approached Correa. Given this, the question before us is whether
Officer’s knowledge that Correa had driven without a license
about two months earlier allowed Officer to stop Correa based on
a suspicion that Correa might be driving without a license again.

¶25 Our decision in West Valley City v. Temblador-Topete, 

, 

, is instructive. There, when an officer ran
a records search on a vehicle, the database informed him that
insurance registration for the vehicle was “not found.” Id. ¶¶ 2, 10
(quotation simplified). Of note, this database was updated “twice



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                           State v. Correa


a month.” Id. ¶ 5. Based on this information, the officer pulled the
vehicle over, and during that stop, the officer discovered drugs on
the driver. Id. ¶ 3. The driver subsequently appealed the denial of
his motion to suppress, arguing, in part, that the information from
the database was too “stale” to support the stop. Id. ¶ 18. We
disagreed, concluding that “two-week-old information” was not
too stale to support a reasonable suspicion of criminality. Id.

¶26 In doing so, we cited with approval language from a Tenth
Circuit case holding that when

       the legal infraction at issue typically wears on for
       days or weeks or months (like, say, driving without
       a license or appropriate emissions and safety
       certifications), rather than concludes quickly (like,
       say, jaywalking or mugging), the timeliness of the
       information on which the government relies to
       effect an investigative detention recedes in
       importance compared to other factors, such as the
       type and duration of [the] offense at issue.

Id. ¶ 19 (quoting United States v. Cortez-Galaviz, 

(10th Cir. 2007)).

¶27 We then quoted additional language from that same case
recognizing that “‘outer boundaries’” must “‘exist for the
usefulness of data, even for offenses typically protracted and
ongoing in nature.’” 

 ¶ 20 (quoting Cortez-Galaviz, 

). And at oral argument in this appeal, the State agreed that
there must indeed be some temporal limitation on the continuing
utility of information about the past license or insurance status of
a driver. In response to a question from a member of this court,
the State agreed that if Officer had learned that Correa did not
have a valid license six months earlier, the State “would not stand
here arguing that” the detention was justified.




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                            State v. Correa


¶28 And this must be so. After all, the Fourth Amendment’s
focus is on reasonableness, and courts are thus tasked with
balancing “personal security against the importance of the
governmental interests alleged to justify the intrusion.” Hubbard,

 (quotation simplified). As we previously
recognized in Temblador-Topete, and as we reiterate now, it simply
couldn’t be reasonable to hold that once a citizen is cited for
driving without insurance or a license, police now have ongoing
and indefinite authority to seize that citizen to see if the citizen is
committing this same offense again.

¶29 To be clear, the State isn’t asking us to hold as much.
Instead, it is simply arguing that the information at issue here
wasn’t too stale to support this particular detention. As a result,
we’re confronted with something of a line-drawing problem. And
our starting place for that assessment is Temblador-Topete, where
we held that information about a driver’s insurance status that
was two weeks old could support a detention, and where we also
cited with approval the Tenth Circuit’s holding that “twenty-dayold” information can be relied on too. Templador-Topete, 

.

¶30 But even so, we conclude that this detention was
unreasonable. The State’s argument in this case seems to rest on
two alternative assumptions—first, that it’s reasonable to suspect
that after a citizen is cited for driving without a license, the citizen
won’t promptly try to obtain a license; or second, that even if the
citizen does try to promptly obtain a license, the citizen might not
be able to complete the process within two months.

¶31 We see no reason to indulge the first assumption. It’s of
course true that a “determination that reasonable suspicion exists
. . . need not rule out the possibility of innocent conduct.” State v.
Simons, 

, 

 (quotation simplified). But
it’s also true that reasonable suspicion “requires an objectively
reasonable belief that an individual is engaged in or is about to be



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                           State v. Correa


engaged in criminal activity.” State v. Gurule, 

, 

 (emphasis added, quotation otherwise simplified). And
the “touchstone” of a Fourth Amendment analysis is “always the
reasonableness of the seizure.” State v. Smith, 

, 

 (quotation simplified). In the absence of some additional
information (such as a known history of this person repeatedly
driving without a license), we don’t think it is objectively
reasonable for an officer to simply assume that after a citizen was
previously cited for driving without a license, that citizen didn’t
fix the problem and is now committing that same offense again—
much less to allow an officer to seize that citizen based solely on
that assumption.

¶32 On the State’s second assumption, we see no record
support for it. The State has given us no indication that Officer
even knew what the previous problem with Correa’s license was.
Had Correa never taken the requisite tests and never obtained a
license at all? Was it instead a mere payment error? Was it
something else? And whatever the problem was, the State has also
provided no factual support for the assertion that Correa could
not have corrected it within two months.

¶33 In short, we don’t think it’s reasonable to seize an
otherwise law-abiding citizen based on nothing more than
information that this citizen was cited for driving without a
license two months earlier. Because the State has provided no
other justification for the seizure at issue, we hold that it was not
justified. We therefore reverse the district court’s denial of
Correa’s motion to suppress. 3




3. We briefly address one final potential issue. It’s settled that,
“absent an exception to the exclusionary rule, evidence obtained
in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against
unreasonable searches and seizures should be excluded.” State v.
                                                    (continued…)


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                           State v. Correa


                          CONCLUSION

¶34 Because Officer seized Correa without a reasonable
suspicion of ongoing criminal conduct, we reverse the district
court’s denial of Correa’s motion to suppress. We thus remand the
case for the district court to set aside the conditional guilty plea,
as well as for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.




Anderson, 

, ¶ 8, 

 (quotation simplified). In
its brief, the State suggests that Correa “has not provided the
Court with an appropriate remedy” because, in the State’s view,
the exclusionary rule should not be applied in instances of “racial
profiling” like the one alleged by Correa.
        But as discussed above, we’re not reversing on the basis of
improper racial profiling. Rather, we’re reversing because Officer
did not have reasonable suspicion of ongoing criminal conduct.
The State has given us no authority, and we see none, for
declining to apply the exclusionary rule to a decision such as this
one.


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