Search for drugs illegal, court says.
Ruling: Traffic stop too long
The smell of dryer sheets in a package of marijuana did not give investigators enough reason to hold a Little Rock motorist for more than a half hour during a traffic stop before a drug dog could arrive to find the contraband, a court ruled Thursday.
A narrow majority of the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the drugs found following a 2014 traffic stop in North Little Rock were the result of an illegal search by investigators. The court struck down the conviction and 12-year sentence received by Cainis MacKintrush for various drug charges.
While four justices ruled that the clues that led investigators to pull MacKintrush’s vehicle over didn’t rise to the level of “reasonable suspicion” to warrant the search of his vehicle, three justices argued that the pattern of facts gathered by investigators was enough.
“The law enforcement officers’ decision to prolong the traffic stop to conduct a dog sniff wasn’t based on conjecture or a hunch either,” Justice Rhonda Wood wrote in her dissent. “It was based on experience, expertise and investigation.”
MacKintrush, now 29, went to a U.S. post office in North Little Rock to pick up a package from California addressed to “Darius Riggs.”
The package, however, had been flagged by postal carriers because it smelled of dryer sheets, which can be used to mask the smell of marijuana. When MacKintrush picked up the package, he signed as “Darius Riggs.”
The person who handed him the package was Mickey Schuetzle, an agent of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Schuetzle had checked out the purported sender of the package, and found no person by that name at the given return address in Los Angeles.
Schuetzle notified North Little Rock drug investigators and they followed MacKintrush as he drove away. They pulled him over after he failed to signal at a turn.
MacKintrush refused officers’ request to search the vehicle, so they waited more than a half hour for a drug-sniffing dog to arrive from the Cammack Village Police Department.
The dog smelled drugs, and officers searched and found marijuana and prescription pills in the vehicle.
MacKintrush, facing multiple drug charges, argued at trial that Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright should suppress the evidence found in MacKintrush’s car because law enforcement held him for too long without justifiable cause. The defendant argued that the search of his vehicle without reasonable suspicion violated the protections set out by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Wright denied the motion and MacKintrush — who was on parole following a 2008 conviction for first-degree battery — was found guilty and sentenced to a combined 144 months in prison.
According to the justices, a police officer can stop anyone suspected of a felony or dangerous misdemeanor for a brief investigation but cannot do so for more than 15 minutes or “such time as is reasonable under the circumstances.”
The court majority’s opinion said the clues seen by investigators amounted to “bare suspicion.”
“Reasonable suspicion,” justices noted, has to “give rise to more than bare suspicion; that is, a suspicion that is reasonable as opposed to an imaginary or purely conjectural suspicion.”
But Wood, joined by Chief Justice Howard Brill and Justice Robin Wynne, argued that the majority unfairly isolated each fact or clue. Wood wrote that the big picture view taken by investigators was proper because “these facts cannot be sealed off from one another.”
“The facts … when considered together and in totality, gave law enforcement a coherent narrative of criminality: MacKintrush had illegal drugs shipped to an address where he did not live, directed to a recipient with a different name, and signed that person’s name instead of his own. … [The package] emitted the odor of a common masking agent,” Wood wrote. “Put a different way, the facts and circumstances gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that MacKintrush was engaged in drug-related criminal activity.”
MacKintrush remained at a state prison facility in Texarkana on Thursday night.