Felony drug charge and DWI dismissed
Case
State v. Anderson
62-CR-24-6811
Ramsey County District Court
2nd Judicial District
Unlawful stop expansion, unlawful arrest. Motion to suppress and dismiss the case was granted.
A traffic stop for an inoperable taillight led to felony drug possession and DWI charges after the arresting officer searched the client’s mouth without a warrant, arrested her for refusing field sobriety tests, and then searched her person incident to that arrest — finding methamphetamine.
The government’s case rested on the evidence from those searches.
The legal approach
Thomas moved to suppress everything and dismiss both counts.
The suppression hearing turned on the officer’s own testimony and body camera footage. Thomas elicited from the arresting officer on cross-examination that:
The client was not speeding, swerving, or committing any moving violations
The client was cooperative, properly identified herself, and gave her correct address
The officer had a “nice conversation” with the client during the stop
The officer did not observe any signs of impairment — no odor of alcohol, no dilated pupils, no wavering stance, no slurred speech — before initiating the mouth search and demanding field sobriety tests
Thomas also drew on the officer’s own recorded words to expose the lack of individualized suspicion.
The officer was captured on body camera stating her basis for believing the client did drugs, “There is meth underneath your seat, it’s wrapped up in a butterfly clip just like the one in your hair — me as the police that makes me think that the people inside the car do drugs.”
The officer further admitted that the hair clip was a common item owned by many people, and that the condition of the client’s mouth — which the complaint used to suggest impairment — could have resulted from lawful behavior.
The officer also acknowledged that when she found the suspected drugs in the car in the area where the passenger had been reaching, her immediate reaction was to say, “Whoa, that’s probably what he was hiding.”
Thomas put those words before the court as the officer’s own admission that the contraband in the vehicle was associated with the passenger, not the client.
The result
The court granted Thomas’s motion on three independent grounds.
First, ordering the client to open her mouth for a warrantless search was an unlawful expansion of the traffic stop — not closely related to the taillight violation that justified the stop in the first place, and unsupported by any particularized, individualized suspicion that the client was under the influence. The court found no evidence specific to the client — as opposed to the passenger or the vehicle generally — that supported the expansion.
Second, because the stop was unlawfully expanded, the client had no legal obligation to submit to field sobriety tests. Without that obligation, arresting her for refusing the tests lacked probable cause entirely. The officer acknowledged she had intended to let the client go before searching the vehicle.
Third, everything discovered in the search of the client’s person — conducted incident to that unlawful arrest — was fruit of the poisonous tree under Mapp v. Ohio and Wong Sun v. United States and had to be suppressed.
With no admissible evidence remaining, both the felony drug charge and the DWI were dismissed.
Disclaimer
This case has been anonymized to protect client confidentiality. Past results do not guarantee or predict future outcomes. Every case is different, and the result in any particular matter depends on its specific facts, the applicable law, and the circumstances of each client.
