Court rules drivers can be ordered from cars during drug sweeps

Gray Rohrer

Gray Rohrer is a freelance reporter based in Tallahassee. He has previously worked for the Orlando Sentinel, and his work has also been featured in various publications such as the Sun Sentinel Media Group and Yahoo News. Gray’s reporting primarily focuses on local politics and issues within Florida.

Police officers can order a driver they’ve pulled over out of the vehicle to ensure their safety and that of a K-9 unit conducting a drug sweep, the Florida Supreme Court ruled.

Such an order doesn’t violate a driver’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, Justice Renatha Francis wrote in the 5-1 opinion for the court, as prior U.S. Supreme Court precedent already allows for it.

“We hold that binding Fourth Amendment precedent permits a K-9 officer arriving midway through a lawful traffic stop to command the driver to exit the vehicle for officer safety before conducting a lawful vehicle sweep,” Francis wrote.

The case stemmed from a 2018 incident in which Tampa Police officers pulled over Joshua Creller after he maneuvered through a gas station to avoid a red light; a traffic violation. Two officers approached the vehicle, including one in plain clothes, and asked Creller to search the vehicle, to which he refused.

The officer called for a K-9 unit to sweep the vehicle. The uniformed officer was still completing the citation for Creller when the K-9 unit arrived. Creller refused requests to search the vehicle and order to exit the vehicle while the K-9 unit conducted the sweep. The officers then arrested him for obstruction and resisting without violence and then found methamphetamine on Creller.

A lower court found in favor of the state when Creller’s attorney argued the evidence was obtained in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights and should be quashed, but the Second District Court of Appeal overturned that decision, putting it in direct conflict with a ruling from the Fifth District Court of Appeal from 2017. That prompted the Florida high court to intervene.

In his dissent, Justice Jorge Labarga cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 1997, Rodriguez v. United States, which held that using a K-9 unit sweep after a traffic stop without reasonable suspicion violated the Fourth Amendment.

“The arbitrariness of the vehicle sweep here, along with the evidence that removal was not necessary to ensure officer safety during issuance of the traffic citation, calls for us to apply Rodriguez,” Labarga wrote.

“The forced removal of a driver from the vehicle before the probable cause of the existence of contraband has been established – and without any evidence that such seizure is necessary to ensure officer safety during the issuance of a traffic citation – constitutes an unreasonable seizure without any justification under the Fourth Amendment.”

But Francis countered that the Rodriguez case doesn’t apply because the traffic stop was still ongoing. When the K-9 unit arrived, the officers hadn’t issued the original traffic citation yet.

“In this case, the attempted sweep occurred during a lawful traffic stop, not after a traffic citation was issued,” Francis wrote.