State v. Lemert, Minn.S.Ct., 3/5/2014. Mr. Lemert was riding shotgun with his supposed buddy, Mr. Anthony, when the cops stopped Mr. Anthony’s truck, intending to arrest him on a drug offense from a couple of days earlier. An officer pulled Mr. Lemert out of the truck and performed a pat search, which produced drugs.
Mr. Lemert challenged the search. The trial court denied the suppression motion, concluding that the officers had a reasonable, articulable suspicion that Mr. Lemert was armed and dangerous. The court of appeals affirmed the trial court’s ruling. Read about that here. The court of appeals said that the search was legal because Mr. Lemert was in a truck that had been stopped on suspicion that its driver had recently engaged in “large-scale drug activity.” This rationale is a riff on what’s called the “automatic-companion rule,” which permits officers to do a pat search of any person who is in the company of someone whom the officers have arrested.
Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Stras slaps down the court of appeals. He says it’s still a “totality of the circumstances” world. For that matter, even the state did not jump on board the “automatic companion” rule.
Here, among other things, the cops knew that Mr. Anthony was not a solo drug dealer, knew that he had used this same truck earlier in the day to complete a drug deal, knew that the two had left Anthony’s apartment together, and that Anthony was a felony-level dealer of narcotics. Lastly, the court has decided that cops know that there is a “substantial nexus” between drug dealing and violence. State v. Craig, 826 N.W.2d 789 (Minn. 2013). The “totality of [those] circumstances made the pat search lawful.
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