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officer must have reasonable articulable suspicion to support asking any of these questions, and
without it, any after-discovered evidence must automatically be suppressed.10
Our caselaw says the opposite. We have long said that during a lawful stop, police may
“obtain the registration for the vehicle and request the identities of its occupants,” “seek radio
dispatch confirmation of the information obtained from the vehicle occupants,” and “ask
questions unrelated to the traffic violation.” Thomas v. Commonwealth, 57 Va. App. 267, 277
(2010). The uncontroversial premise that law enforcement officers may ask questions unrelated
to the traffic stop is grounded in United States Supreme Court precedent. In Arizona v. Johnson,
555 U.S. 323, 333 (2009), the Supreme Court held that “[a]n officer’s inquiries into matters
unrelated to the justification for the traffic stop . . . do not convert the encounter into something
other than a lawful seizure, so long as those inquiries do not measurably extend the duration of
the stop.”
Then came Rodriguez. To understand and apply Rodriguez, we must first step back to
look at the exclusionary rule more generally. At core, the rule bars the government from
introducing evidence that has been obtained through a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 484-85 (1963). To be excluded, the evidence must
have been “obtained as a product” of the illegal search or seizure. Wood v. Commonwealth, 27
Va. App. 21, 30-31 (1998); United States v. Gray, 491 F.3d 138, 154 (4th Cir. 2007) (explaining
“[t]he threshold question is whether [the] evidence is the product of an illegal search”). If a
10 My colleagues in the majority try to resist what Knight-Walker readily admits is
required by her reading of Rodriguez. Without providing any reason why, the majority tries to
exclude typical questions an officer asks such as “where the driver is traveling to or from,” “how
their day or night is going” and “are there any weapons in the car?” from the scope of its holding.
But under the per se rule endorsed by the majority, delay is delay, and law enforcement officers
should be on notice that delay from such questions (or even stopping to respond to a text
message or listen to an unrelated APB) would all unconstitutionally extend a traffic stop under
the majority’s logic. Jump to an indexed page (23 of 23)