MIRANDA RULING DOESN'T ALWAYS APPLY IN TRAFFIC STOPS

TRENTON -- Police officers need not recite so-called Miranda rights before
questioning the occupants of every car they pull over, a state appeals
court has ruled.

The opinion, released Tuesday, brings New Jersey in line with a 1984 U.S.
Supreme Court ruling that said the Miranda ruling does not automatically
apply during traffic stops.

The new ruling arose from a 1999 incident in which a police officer bluntly
asked two men whether they were carrying contraband, and a passenger
produced a packet of drugs.

When the case came to trial in Gloucester County, Judge Martin Herman threw
out the evidence because, he said, the suspects should have been made aware
of their rights to remain silent and to seek the help of an attorney, as
outlined in the 1966 Miranda ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1984 the Supreme Court ruled that the Miranda warning does not
automatically apply in traffic situations. Herman's ruling in the 1999 New
Jersey case differed from the high court's opinion, and for that reason the
case went to a three-member appeals panel.

In overturning the Herman decision, the panel reviewed the January 1999
drug arrest, in which a Westville police officer stopped two men in a car
on a license violation.

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

Daniel Hickman Jr., a passenger, produced a packet of cocaine and was arrested.

In court later, 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 that required the Miranda warning.

"Field inquiry means being more gentle," Herman wrote. "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.

But in the opinion issued Tuesday, Appellate Division Judge Stephen
Skillman said the officer was within his rights to ask the question, to
take the drugs, and to apply them as evidence. Skillman reversed Herman's
findings and ordered that Hickman stand trial.

Skillman said that a traffic stop is not the same as a session in a police
station 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 with paperwork, they will be free to go.

"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."