Ohio: Yanking Motorist Out of Car Is Not a Welfare Check

The Newspaper
by The Newspaper


Cops in Ohio may not rip a motorist out of his vehicle to “check on his welfare.” The state court of appeals handed down a decision earlier this month in a case involving a man parked on the side of the road in a quiet Columbus residential neighborhood who was “helped” out of his car with physical force.

Al E. Forrest sat in the driver’s seat of a 2003 Ford Explorer with another man in the passenger seat as two police officers came up on either side of the vehicle. According to Officer Kevin George’s testimony, he just wanted to see if the Explorer driver was okay. The officers had no suspicion of any criminal activity prior to approaching the Explorer. When George poked his head into the driver’s window, Forrest looked surprised to see a cop staring at him through the window. George said this was a sign of “nervousness.” When George saw money in Forrest’s left hand, he ordered the man out of the SUV. This was the beginning of the legal problem for the Columbus officer.

“We note initially that the police needed no suspicion of activity, legal or illegal, in order to walk up to or approach the Ford Explorer,” Judge G. Gary Tyack wrote for the appeals court. “What a person willingly displays in public is not subject to Fourth Amendment protection. However, Officer George went far beyond approaching the vehicle.”


Forrest did not immediately get out of the Explorer. Instead, he rolled up the window and removed the keys from the ignition. Unsatisfied with this response, George pulled open the car door and yanked Forrest out. George had no warrant and had still not observed any illegal activity. Because of this, a Franklin County Court of Common Pleas judge suppressed evidence obtained from arresting Forrest. The state appealed. The three-judge appellate panel found the prosecution’s claim that exceptions to the Fourth Amendment applied to be entirely unpersuasive.

“The state argues probable cause to arrest and then search incident to arrest are present, but both fail because they are premised on Forrest’s wrongfully refusing to obey the order to step out of the vehicle,” Judge Tyack wrote. “The officer, however, had no basis to order Forrest out of the vehicle because he lacked reasonable articulable suspicion of criminal activity when Officer George reached across Forrest’s body to grab his hand and pull him out of the vehicle. Since there was no lawful arrest, the search and seizure cannot be justified as a search incident to a lawful arrest.”

With the suppression motion upheld, the state has no case against Forrest. A copy of the decision is available in a 30k PDF file at the source link below.

Source:

Ohio v. Forrest (Court of Appeals, State of Ohio, 12/6/2011)

[Courtesy: Thenewspaper.com]

The Newspaper
The Newspaper

More by The Newspaper

Comments
Join the conversation
11 of 20 comments
  • CJinSD CJinSD on Dec 27, 2011

    I don't support police efforts to raise revenue and court efforts to ignore our rights to enable raising of said revenue. What we have here is a cop who walked up on a drug deal in process. Yippee. Another gun toting drug dealer has beaten the system, probably not for the first time considering he had a previous arrest warrant that was repealed.

    • See 3 previous
    • Pch101 Pch101 on Dec 28, 2011
      @modestholdings The fact remains that the arresting officer happened upon a drug deal in progress and correctly identified it as such That's the problem -- he didn't identify it as such. Instead, the cops claimed that their intent was to "check on the well being" of the vehicle's occupants. The basic problem here is that the cops can't just stop people on a hunch; the Fourth Amendments requires at least "reasonable suspicion" for a stop and frisk. And the cops didn't have that. We all can guess what happened here. The cops had a hunch but didn't see anything to justify their fishing expedition. Because of the lack of reasonable suspicion, they instead "testi-lied" that they were checking up on the suspect out of concern for his health, only to stumble upon this crime in progress. That lie was a poor one. To justify the frisk, they needed suspicion, but the health checkup didn't give them that suspicion. If they were going to lie, they should have made up some other facts that gave them suspicion.
  • CJinSD CJinSD on Dec 28, 2011

    Yes, you fail. Creating the fiction that the framers meant police couldn't take action to investigate crimes they witness isn't the act of a well mind.

    • See 4 previous
    • Nrd515 Nrd515 on Dec 29, 2011

      CJinSD- Wow, I hope you're never on a jury for anything more important than a jaywalking case. If you get called for jury duty, do everyone a favor and just tell the judge you'll always find the person guilty. That will keep you off the jury, and hopefully someone with a more rational view can take your place.

  • Oberkanone My grid hurts!Good luck with installing charger locations at leased locations with aging infrastructure. Perhaps USPS would have better start modernizing it's Post offices to meet future needs. Of course, USPS has no money for anything.
  • Dukeisduke If it's going to be a turbo 4-cylinder like the new Tacoma, I'll pass.BTW, I see lots of Tacomas (mine is a 2013), but I haven't seen any 4th-gen trucks yet.
  • Oberkanone Expect 4Runner to combine best aspects of new Land Cruiser and new Tacoma and this is what I expect from 2025 4Runner.Toyota is REALLY on it's best game recently. Tacoma and Land Cruiser are examples of this.
  • ArialATOMV8 All I hope is that the 4Runner stays rugged and reliable.
  • Arthur Dailey Good. Whatever upsets the Chinese government is fine with me. And yes they are probably monitoring this thread/site.
Next