COURT: TRAFFIC STOPS DON'T REQUIRE MIRANDAS

A state appeals court said it is okay if a police officer who may have lost
the patience for more subtle detective tactics just blurts out a question
about drugs to occupants of a car.

The court in a ruling released yesterday said officers in such cases are
not required to first give the occupants of a car the so-called Miranda
warnings against self-incrimination.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that the Miranda warnings, familiar to
anyone who watches cop shows on television, do not automatically apply
during traffic stops.

But the New Jersey appeals court, in an opinion designated for publication
in law books, believed this had to be further clarified since Superior
Court Judge Martin Herman in Gloucester County disagreed.

The case arose from a drug arrest in January 1999 in which a Westville
police officer simply put the question to the two men in a car he had
stopped because the driver's license had been revoked.

"Have you got something on you that you should surrender right now? Any
contraband, weapons, anything like that?"

Daniel Hickman Jr., a passenger, promptly replied, "Yes, I have something
in my shoe." He then took it off and produced a small packet of crack
cocaine, for which he was arrested.

Herman, the Gloucester County judge, said the evidence could not be used in
court and criticized the officer's directness. "Field inquiry means being
more gentle," Herman wrote.

Herman said the question and the environment -- a car on the side of the
road with a patrol car behind it, lights flashing -- was a coercive one.
And a coercive environment means police officers are required under the
1966 Miranda ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to inform suspects they have
a right to keep quiet and to seek the help of an attorney.

"The officer is basically compelling and demanding information in which
this defendant knew he had no reason to believe that he was free to get out
of that car and walk away," Herman said.

Perhaps Hickman was not free to just walk away, appellate division Judge
Stephen Skillman wrote for a three-judge panel, but a traffic stop is not
the same as a police interrogation, which is when the Miranda rules were
designed to kick in.

In the case of a traffic stop such as this, Skillman said the officer was
within his rights to ask the question, to take the drugs when Hickman
produced them and to apply them as evidence. Skillman reversed Herman's
findings and ordered that Hickman stand trial.

On the legal points, Skillman said a traffic stop is not the same thing as
being taken to the police station and into an interrogation room, because a
person does not know how long such an interrogation is going to take. The
coercion in a police interrogation is compounded by the implication the
questioning will not end until some answers are produced.

None of this exists on a roadside, Skillman said, where the occupants of a
vehicle subject to a traffic stop expect that as soon as the officer is
finished writing a summons, they will be free to go on their way.

"Roadside questioning of a motorist is not transformed into custodial
interrogation that must be preceded by Miranda warnings simply because a
police officer's questioning is accusatory in nature or designed to elicit
incriminating evidence," Skillman wrote. "When defendant was asked these
questions, he was not in a hostile or intimidating atmosphere. He was
simply sitting in a car that had been stopped."