Police departments around Indiana will have to review how officers conduct traffic stops after the state appeals court threw out a marijuana possession conviction against a driver, legal experts said.
The appeals court ruled that Kokomo police didn’t have grounds to stop the driver simply for not turning while his turn signal was blinking. Officers found the marijuana after the stop, but the court said this month that nothing in Indiana’s law makes it illegal to drive through an intersection with an activated turn signal.
The ruling points out the importance of officers knowing what constitutes a traffic violation, Joel Schumm, a professor at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law, told The Indianapolis Star for a story Monday.
“If they pull someone over for something they think is a traffic violation and is not, evidence of drugs and guns and other things is not going to be able to be used against the defendant,” Schumm said.
The appeals court ruling said a stop is legitimate if an actual traffic violation occurs, or if an officer “has reasonable suspicion that the person detained is involved in criminal activity.”
Most officers would have pulled over the driver in Kokomo, said Noblesville police Lt. Bruce Barnes. Now they’ll have to spot a different reason for a traffic stop.
“It does cause us some concern,” Barnes said. “And we hope that ... the legislators will take notice of it [and] make the appropriate changes to make the law as it should be.”
The Indiana appeals court in the past year has also dismissed convictions for drug and weapons charges in cases in which drivers were stopped for turning too widely.
Brad Banks, a division supervisor at the Marion County prosecutor’s office, said not many traffic stops are made under circumstances such as those in the Kokomo case and most traffic violations involve running stop lights and speeding.
“It’s just very rare,” Banks said. “In 10 years, I’ve never seen another case where that was the cause of the stop. It’s just not something you see very often, quite frankly.”
