Q: If the passenger of a vehicle in a traffic stop refuses to give his name can the officer threaten to take them to jail?
I was stopped for not having any working tail lights on the vehicle I was driving. The officer who pulled me over gathered my info and returned to the vehicle to run the info. During her time away another officer joined the scene and started questioning us. He recognized one of the passengers and spoke to him. He then asked my other passenger his name in which he declined to answer. The officer then tells the passenger that if he doesn't answer then he will be taken to jail. The passenger proceeds to exit the vehicle and attempt to flee. He is apprehended and apparently is found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia. During this time the officer In charge of the stop returns with my info and says that she is trying to get us on out of the scene since the info Checked out. The other officer denies this and we are all removed from the vehicle and a full search of the vehicle was conducted without consent.
A:
Yes. A traffic stop is technically an arrest, but most of the time, the police officer releases the driver with just a ticket.
The officer is allowed to ask for basic information such as name & address of each person in the vehicle, and you are expected to respond.
The broken tail light provides reasonable suspicion to pull over the vehicle. Once the police officer talks to the driver (and in this case, witnesses the defendant fleeing the scene), the police officer can claim the driver's behavior provided probable cause to believe defendant possesses (or the vehicle contains) evidence of a crime, so the cop can search the driver and the vehicle without consent. It makes no difference that the driver did not consent to the search in this situation.
A good criminal defense attorney will fight this as a pretextual stop, argue that the cop had no justification for pulling over the driver, and try to get the evidence suppressed.
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