State of Texas v. Duran, Anthony

396 S.W.3d 563, 2013 WL 1628957, 2013 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 715
Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas·Decided April 17, 2013·No. PD-0771-12·Published·Cited by 251 cases

Opinion

OPINION

COCHRAN, J.,

delivered the opinion of the Court

in which MEYERS, PRICE, WOMACK, JOHNSON, KEASLER, HERVEY and ALCALA, JJ., joined.

When Anthony Duran made a left-hand turn in front of a speeding police car, the police officer braked, turned to follow, pulled Mr. Duran’s car over, and eventually arrested him for DWI. Mr. Duran filed a motion to suppress, claiming that the officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop him. The trial judge granted the motion, the State appealed, and the court of appeals reversed the trial judge’s ruling. 1 The issue before us is whether an appellate court must defer to a trial judge’s factual findings which, when viewed piecemeal and in isolation, may be ambiguous, but, when read in their totality, reasonably support his legal conclusion. 2 It must. A reviewing court must *567 apply the same non-technical, commonsense deference — not only to the trial judge’s individual factual findings, but also to the totality of those findings — that it uses to assess a magistrate’s determination of probable cause. 3 This case depends upon a single fact, not any legal issue: Did the police officer actually see a traffic violation before he detained Mr. Duran? The trial judge’s findings indicate that he did not. We must defer to that determination of fact.

I.

Officer Gabriel Candia 4 of the El Paso Police Department was on patrol with his partner one night when he received a domestic-violence dispatch call at 2:35 a.m. Officer Candia responded to that call and sped southbound on Zaragoza Street. Despite his high rate of speed and running of a red light, Officer Candia did not turn on his emergency lights or siren. Meanwhile, Mr. Duran was driving northbound on Zaragoza, and he made a left turn in front of Officer Candia. The officer hit his brakes and, from the far-left lane, made a right turn onto Saul Kleinfeld Drive to follow Mr. Duran. As Officer Candia was completing his turn, Mr. Duran’s tire briefly crossed the center yellow line on Saul Kleinfeld. Two seconds later, Officer Candia turned on his emergency lights and siren to make a traffic stop. After investigating, Officer Candia arrested Mr. Duran for DWI.

At the suppression hearing, Officer Can-dia testified that he believed Mr. Duran failed to yield the right-of-way when making the left turn. He said, “What I felt he did was to make the turn ... in such a manner that made me decelerate and, as a matter of fact, I recall hitting the brakes. At that point it caught my attention obviously.” So Officer Candia “proceeded to make a right turn [and] follow the vehicle.” He stated, “What caught my attention then was that I noticed that the vehicle had crossed into — crossed the double yellow line.”

When asked on cross-examination exactly when he decided to stop Mr. Duran, Officer Candia responded, “Once I saw that he failed to yield the right-of-way to me, and again when I saw him going into on-coming traffic, that is when I determined to make the stop[.]” Officer Candia agreed that he made “an important decision” to pull away from the domestic-violence dispatch call to turn right and stop Mr. Duran instead.

After the State rested, Mr. Duran called Roy Davis, a former police commander, who testified that a car turning left generally must yield to an oncoming car, but that is not the case if the oncoming car is exceeding the speed limit. In such cases, the speeding car has lost the right-of-way. *568 Based on a review of the DVD recording of the stop, Mr. Davis determined that Officer Candía was traveling at 60.5 m.p.h. in a 45 m.p.h. zone. 5 Based on his viewing of the DVD, Mr. Davis concluded that “the officer’s action clearly shows that the decision [to stop Mr. Duran] was made when he made the turn behind the defendant.”

After hearing the testimony and reviewing the DVD recording of the traffic stop, the trial judge made the following pertinent findings of fact:

7. After the Defendant made his left turn, his tires briefly drifted over the center stripe. There was no oncoming traffic and no danger associated with that event.
8. The Court finds that Officer Candía most probably did not even see the center stripe violation because he did not mention it in his report.
9. In any event, the center stripe violation played no part in Officer Can-dia’s decision to stop the Defendant.
10. The Court finds it to be totally beyond all credibility to assume that an officer, while speeding and running red lights to respond to an assault family violence call, would abandon that call, turn right from the far left lane and pull up behind a driver (who at that time committed no infractions) just to see if he might then commit one.
11. The Court finds that Officer Candía made a clear and unconditional decision to stop the Defendant solely on the basis of what Officer Candía erroneously believed to be an unlawful left turn. This is what Officer Candía wrote in his report (which made no mention of any center stripe violation) and is the only scenario which could conceivably justify abandoning an assault family violence call.
12.Officer Candía was wrong in his opinion about the Defendant’s turn. The turn was not unlawful in any respect. Indeed, the State admits that Defendant’s turn was lawful. 6

Concluding that Officer Candía “made this stop solely on the basis of [Mr. Duran’s] left turn,” the trial judge granted the motion to suppress.

The State appealed, arguing that, because the DVD “clearly shows” that Mr. Duran’s tire crossed the double-yellow line while Officer Candía was behind him, the reasonable-suspicion requirement for a traffic stop was met. The court of appeals agreed. It explained that the reasonable-suspicion determination uses an objective standard and the “DVD recording provides an objective justification for the stop.” 7 It reversed the trial judge’s ruling because he had focused on Officer Candia’s “subjective reasons for effectuating the stop.” 8

II.

A.

An officer must have reasonable suspicion that some crime was, or is about to be, committed before he may make a traffic stop. 9 Critical to that reasonable-suspicion analysis is whether the stop is supported by “specific and articulable *569 facts” at its very inception. 10 The almost exclusive inquiry appropriate to determining the lawfulness of a traffic stop is whether the officer had “a pre-existing sufficient quantum of evidence to justify the stop.” 11

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State of Texas v. Duran, Anthony, 396 S.W.3d 563, 2013 WL 1628957, 2013 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 715 (Tex. 2013).

396 S.W.3d 563 (State of Texas v. Duran, Anthony) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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