STATE v. PETTERSON11/28/1990
The Superior Court (Penobscot County, Smith J.) entered judgment on defendant Orville Patterson's conditional plea of guilty to the charge of operating a motor vehicle while an habitual offender, 29 M.R.S.A. § 2298 (Class C) (Supp. 1989). On appeal, defendant challenges the denial by the Superior Court (Browne, A.R.J.) of his motion to suppress evidence. Defendant contends that a state police officer stopped him at an illegal roadblock that tainted all of the evidence the officer obtained after the stop. We affirm the court's finding that the stop did not violate defendant's right, secured by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution and article I, section 5, of the Maine Constitution, to be free of an unreasonable seizure.
In the early afternoon of Saturday, September 30, 1989, on Route 178 in Eddington, Maine State Police Officer Barry Curtis conducted a roadblock for the purpose of checking vehicle safety. The uniformed officer parked his plainly marked cruiser in the middle of the road and stopped all cars coming from both directions. At approximately 1:50 p.m., the officer saw a pickup truck stop and change drivers about 100 yards from the roadblock. The driver, defendant Orville Patterson, slid over to the passenger seat, while his passenger, Harold Spann, got out and walked into the trees along the side of the road. When Spann returned to the truck, he got into the driver's seat. The officer stopped the truck when it came up to his cruiser. He asked both men for licenses, but defendant refused to surrender one, saying that he did not have to because he was not driving.
The officer put defendant in the cruiser and ran a license check. On learning that defendant's license had been suspended, Officer Curtis arrested him.
We first addressed the constitutionality of a police roadblock in State v. Cloukey, 486 A.2d 143 (Me. 1985), which involved as does this case a roadblock designed to check traffic safety features. There we distinguished the fixed roadblock from the roving stop held unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 99 S.Ct. 1391, 59 L.Ed.2d 660 (1979). In Cloukey, 486 A.2d at 145, our analysis "beg with the fundamental question whether the action of the police officers in conducting the roadblock was `reasonable' under the Fourth Amendment." In finding the safety check roadblock at issue in Cloukey reasonable, we adopted the test set forth in Delaware v. Prouse:
" he permissibility of a particular law enforcement practice
is judged by balancing its intrusion on the individual's Fourth
Amendment interests against its promotion of legitimate
governmental interests."
State v. Cloukey, 486 A.2d at 145 (quoting Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. at 654, 99 S.Ct. at 1396). All of our subsequent roadblock cases have continued to apply a flexible balancing test between the magnitude of the intrusion and the state interest advanced. See State v. Sherburne, 571 A.2d 1181, 1184 (Me. 1990) (fish and wildlife roadblock); State v. McMahon, 557 A.2d 1324, 1325 (Me. 1989) (vehicle safety and OUI roadblock); State v. Leighton, 551 A.2d 116, 117 (Me. 1988) (OUI roadblock).
We are confirmed in our approach by the United States Supreme Court's decision within the year in Michigan Dep't. of State Police v. Sitz, ___ U.S. ___, 110 S.Ct. 2481, 110 L.Ed.2d 412 (1990), which affirmed the constitutionality of "sobriety checkpoints" or OUI roadblocks conducted by Michigan's state police. Sitz, id., 110 S.Ct. at 2485, applied the balancing test developed in Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47, 50-51, 99 S.Ct. 2637, 2640, 61 L.Ed.2d 357 (1979), that
involves a weigh
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