In U.S. v. Hernandez, No. 04-11776 (July 29, 2005), the Court (Edmondson, Dubina, Hull) held that a traffic stop did not result in an unconstitutional seizure, when the police officer became suspicious in response to questioning, and detained the defendant for 17-minutes during questioning before conducting a consensual search of the vehicle – a search which uncovered narcotics in a hidden compartment of the vehicle.
The Court noted the following circumstances which supported reasonable suspicion on the part of the officer who stopped defendant’s vehicle for speeding at 3:02 a.m. on an Alabama highway: (1) the implausible excuse for speeding (looking for a restroom for diarhea when the vehicle had just missed a rest station, (2) empty food containers in the vehicle, consistent with the practice of drug traffickers who do not want to stop for food and leave their vehicle unattended, (3) discrepancies in the stories about the trip’s length and purpose, (4) abnormal nervousness in the detainee, (5) nonstop travel at night in severe weather, (6) lack of knowledge of the trip’s destination, (7) travel between two main source cities for narcotics, (8) minimal luggage.
The Court noted that under Muelher v. Mena, 125 S.Ct. 1465 (2005), the length of a detention, not the unrelatedness of the questioning to the reason for the stop, is what makes a detention unreasonable. The Court further noted that a 17-minute stop would not, standing alone, likely be deemed too long to be unreasonable, even if, as in this case, it was justified by the evasive answers to police questioning.
