State v. Duffee

No. 894             December 11, 2024                   763

          IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE
                  STATE OF OREGON

                   STATE OF OREGON,
                   Plaintiff-Respondent,
                             v.
              TERESA MICHELLE DUFFEE,
                   Defendant-Appellant.
              Washington County Circuit Court
                   21CR41307; A178547

  Oscar Garcia, Judge.
  Argued and submitted April 22, 2024.
   Kali Montague, Deputy Public Defender, argued the
cause for appellant. Also on the brief was Ernest G. Lannet,
Chief Defender, Criminal Appellate Section, Office of Public
Defense Services.
   Erica L. Herb, Assistant Attorney General, argued
the cause for respondent. Also on the brief were Ellen F.
Rosenblum, Attorney General, and Benjamin Gutman,
Solicitor General.
  Before Shorr, Presiding Judge, Lagesen, Chief Judge, and
Mooney, Senior Judge.
  MOONEY, S. J.
  Affirmed.
764                                                         State v. Duffee

          MOONEY, S. J.
          Defendant appeals a judgment of conviction for
unlawful possession of methamphetamine, ORS 475.894. In
a single assignment of error, defendant challenges the trial
court’s denial of her motion to suppress evidence obtained
during a traffic stop. Defendant contends that police unlawfully extended the scope of the stop by (1) investigating
whether the car was stolen without reasonable suspicion and
(2) asking defendant whether her purse contained drugs.1 In
defendant’s view, those unlawful extensions tainted her arrest
such that suppression of the methamphetamine discovered in
her purse was required. Alternatively, defendant contends
that the search-incident-to-arrest exception did not justify the
warrantless search of her purse because the state failed to
prove actual exigency. For the reasons that follow, we affirm.
          “We review a trial court’s denial of a motion to suppress for legal error, and we are bound by the trial court’s
factual findings if there is any constitutionally sufficient
evidence in the record to support them.” State v. Maciel-Figueroa, 

, 

 (2017). Where
the trial court did not make explicit findings, “we will presume that the trial court decided the facts consistently with
the trial court’s ultimate conclusion.” 

. We state
the facts consistently with that standard.
          While on patrol, a police officer spotted a truck
without a license plate. An expired trip permit was displayed in the truck’s rear window. The officer followed the
truck and further observed that the trip permit was oddly
formatted—the ink color was “different” and the date on the
permit appeared to be written in ballpoint pen. The officer
stopped the truck in a parking lot based on the expired permit. As the officer approached, an individual riding in the
truck bed jumped out and walked away. The officer asked
the driver, defendant’s boyfriend, for his license, which he
did not have. The officer then asked if the car was insured.
Defendant explained that she had recently purchased the
truck and was still in the process of insuring it. At that
point, the officer proceeded to search for the vehicle identification number (VIN) in order to identify the truck and
   1
       The parties agree that the stop itself was lawful.
Cite as 

 (2024)                            765

to determine whether it was stolen. The VIN was visible
through the front windshield, and the driver moved something that was covering the VIN. After initially misreading
the VIN, the officer eventually reported the correct VIN to
dispatch. The officer first received confirmation through the
Mobile Dispatch Terminal in his patrol car that the truck
had been reported stolen.
         While he waited for dispatch to also confirm the
truck’s stolen status, the officer Mirandized defendant and
questioned her about how she acquired the truck and about
a broken key in the ignition. Defendant first stated that
she purchased the truck from someone through “OfferUp,”
a mobile app and online marketplace, but that she did not
know his name. Then later, she admitted that she knew
the seller only as “Sanny.” The officer questioned her about
items in the truck bed, and defendant asked if she was under
arrest, to which the officer replied that he was “still trying
to figure that out.” The officer then asked whether her purse
contained any drugs or weapons, which defendant denied.
Defendant again asked the officer if she was under arrest,
and the officer replied that he was still deciding whether
“to take [her] to jail or give [her] a citation” and that he
would “need to talk to the victim as well.” After asking a
question about the man riding in the truck bed, the officer
again asked whether there was “dope” in her purse, which
defendant again denied. The officer arrested defendant for
possession of a stolen vehicle (PSV), ORS 819.300, and unauthorized use of a vehicle (UUV), ORS 164.135. The officer
then conducted a search incident to arrest of the truck as
well as defendant’s purse, in which methamphetamine was
found. At the suppression hearing, the officer testified that
he received confirmation from dispatch that the truck was
stolen “a few minutes” before placing defendant in handcuffs.
         The trial court denied defendant’s motion to suppress the methamphetamine. In support of its ruling, the
trial court found that the officer developed reasonable suspicion that the car was stolen as the stop progressed and
that, to the extent the officer’s questions about drugs were
unrelated to that investigation, the questions did not lead to
the discovery of the methamphetamine.
766                                                          State v. Duffee

         We first address whether the officer had reasonable suspicion to investigate whether the truck was stolen.
Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution2 imposes both
“subject-matter and durational limitations” on all investigative activities and inquiries conducted during a traffic stop.
State v. Arreola-Botello, 

, 

 (2019).
As we have explained, “[o]fficers investigating a traffic
infraction cannot engage in investigative activities … that
are unrelated to that infraction, unless those activities have
an independent constitutional justification, such as reasonable suspicion of another crime.” State v. Wicks, 

, 69, 

 (2024) (internal quotation marks omitted). An officer has reasonable suspicion if they “can point
to specific and articulable facts that give rise to a reasonable inference that the defendant committed or was about to
commit a specific crime or type of crime.” Maciel-Figueroa,

. The officer’s suspicion “must be objectively
reasonable in light of the totality of circumstances known
to the officer.” Wicks, 332 Or App at 70 (internal quotation
marks omitted). “[A]n officer may develop reasonable suspicion or probable cause during the course of a traffic stop that
may justify activities that would not have been permissible
based on the original purpose of the stop.” State v. Watson,

, 

 (2013).
         Having reviewed the record, we agree with the trial
court that, under the totality of the circumstances, the officer had reasonable suspicion that defendant had committed
the crime of PSV or UUV. By the time the officer began to
search for the VIN, the officer knew the following: (1) the
truck lacked license plates, (2) the trip permit on display in
the truck’s rear window was expired, (3) the trip permit did
not look like a standard Oregon trip permit, which the officer noted before initiating the stop, (4) a man riding in the
truck bed walked off as the officer approached, (5) the driver
did not have a driver’s license, and (6) defendant claimed
ownership of the truck but had not yet insured it. Any of
those facts individually would likely be insufficient to satisfy the reasonable suspicion standard. However, based on
    2
      Article I, section 9, provides, as relevant: “No law shall violate the right
of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable search, or seizure[.]”
Cite as 

 (2024)                                                    767

the lack of documentation, the suspicious trip permit, the
passenger in the truck bed leaving the scene, and importantly, defendant’s claim to own the vehicle, the officer reasonably inferred that defendant was in possession of a stolen
vehicle. We conclude that that inference was objectively reasonable, and therefore, the officer did not unlawfully extend
the traffic stop by searching for the VIN.3
          We next address defendant’s argument that the officer’s questions about drugs tainted defendant’s arrest and
led to the subsequent discovery of methamphetamine in her
purse, and we conclude that the discovery of that evidence
was not the product of unlawful police conduct.4 To determine whether “the evidence that the state seeks to introduce
must be suppressed because that evidence was obtained in
violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights,” we consider the totality of the circumstances, including the temporal proximity between the misconduct and the discovery of
the evidence, any intervening or mitigating circumstances,
and the nature, purpose, and flagrancy of the misconduct.
State v. Unger, 

, 

 (2014); see
also State v. Benning, 

, 

(2015) (summarizing the Unger test as a determination of
whether “the violation of [the] defendant’s rights had such
a tenuous factual link to the disputed evidence that the
unlawful police conduct cannot be properly viewed as the
source of that evidence”). Here, although the officer arrested
defendant shortly after asking whether there was “dope” in
her purse, the officer also received confirmation from dispatch that the truck had been reported stolen close in time
to the arrest. Indeed, while awaiting that confirmation, the
officer’s questioning focused primarily on a broken key in
the ignition and the circumstances under which defendant
had acquired the truck, to which defendant gave shifting
answers. Defendant twice asked if she was under arrest, and
the officer’s responses indicate that he had not yet decided

     3
       We need not address the state’s other argument that the officer’s search for
the VIN was reasonably related to the original purpose of the traffic stop itself.
     4
       The state does not concede that the officer’s questions were unrelated to his
investigation of the truck nor that those questions unlawfully expanded the scope
of his investigative activities in violation of Arreola-Botello. It argues instead that
the questioning did not taint the arrest and that suppression was not required.
768                                           State v. Duffee

whether to arrest her because his investigation of the truck
was ongoing. We conclude that the record demonstrates that
defendant’s responses to the officer’s questions about drugs
were only tenuously connected to his decision to arrest her
and, thus, that the officer’s questioning is not the source of
the disputed evidence.
         Finally, we reject defendant’s argument that the
warrantless search of defendant’s purse was not justified
by the search-incident-to-arrest exception because the state
did not prove actual exigency. That argument is foreclosed
by precedent. State v. Krause, 

, 

 (2016), rev den, 

 (2017) (holding that a search
incident to arrest conducted for the purpose of discovering
evidence of the crime of arrest is not based on exigency, and
thus, “a search for that purpose may be justified even if the
defendant has been removed from the area in which an officer believes that evidence may be located”); see also State v.
Stevens, 

, 

 (2023), rev den,

 (2024) (declining to overrule Krause as plainly
wrong). The trial court did not err in denying defendant’s
motion to suppress.
        Affirmed.