No Seizure Occurs By Officer's Illumination of Already Stopped Vehicle by Squad Spotlight

Illi v. Commissioner of Public Safety, Minn.Ct.App., 12/21/2015. At around 1:30 in the morning an officer saw a red Jeep drive into the parking lot of a stip mall, then stop along a curb in that lot behind a delivery truck.  The officer pulled in behind the Jeep and to its left, stopping several feet away.  The officer illuminated the area with his spotlight and then walked over to the Jeep.  The officer neither activated his emergency lights nor used the squad's loudspeaker.  

Ms. Illi was the sole occupant in the Jeep.  When the officer got to the driver's side of the Jeep he noticed signs of her intoxication. One thing led to another and the officer arrested Ms. Illi for suspected drunk driving.  At the police station Ms. Illi refused to provide an adequate breath sample to determine her intoxication level.  The Commissioner revoked her license; she challenged that revocation saying that the officer had illegally seized her under the state constitution by blocking her in and by shining the squad's spotlight on her vehicle.

The district court had found that the officer had not parked his squad car so as to have prevented the Jeep from leaving.  The court of appeals accepts that finding and thus rejects Ms. Illi's first assertion that the officer seized her by the positioning of his squad car.

The court also rejects Ms. Illi's other assertion that the officer seized her by illuminating the Jeep with the squad's spotlight. There's a case from 1989, Crawford v. Commissioner of Pubic Safety, 441 N.W.2d 837 (Minn.Ct.App. 1989), where the officer briefly illuminated an already stopped vehicle.  The court had held that this did not constitute a seizure.  The court here concludes that the permanency of the spotlight's illumination is a distinction without difference:

We have no cause to suppose that a reasonable person would feel significantly more or less free to drive away depending simply on whether or not the officer had turned the spotlight off before approaching. These salient circumstances did not constitute a seizure in Crawford, and so they also do not constitute a seizure here.