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continued to question him after the stop was over because a reasonable person would not have
felt free to leave in that moment. Id. at 342. This extra detention was unlawful because it was
not authorized by the original mission of the traffic stop, which was already completed.
Applying our Supreme Court’s decision in Harris, this Court concluded that the evidence
obtained following Matthews’s consent was the fruit of the poisonous tree from the unlawful
detention. Id. at 346 (“[P]ursuant to Harris,” the consent given was irrelevant because
“Matthews’s detention exceeded the time reasonably necessary to address the dangling object
traffic violation, the seizure violated the Fourth Amendment.” (citing Harris, 266 Va. at 34)).13
If a defendant is subject to an “illegal detention,” “evidence obtained as a result of the illegal
seizure” must be suppressed unless some exception to the exclusionary rule applies. Harris, 266
Va. at 34 (explaining and applying the “fruit of the position tree” doctrine from Wong Sun, 371
U.S. at 487-88).
Knight-Walker does not argue that the mission of the traffic stop should have ended
before she consented to the search. Instead, Knight-Walker asks us to turn the explanation in
Rodriguez—that an officer may not conduct “unrelated checks . . . in a way that prolongs the
stop”—into a per se rule that any delay an officer adds to a stop necessarily makes the rest of the
detention illegal. Therefore, any evidence uncovered after that point must be suppressed. My
colleagues in the majority have adopted this view. But, as explained above, Rodriguez only
requires exclusion if the evidence was discovered after the stop actually ended or should have
ended. Only then, would the evidence be “fruit of the poisonous tree” from an illegal detention.
13 The traffic stop at issue in Matthews occurred pre-Rodriguez. Accordingly, our Court
found that while the product of the consent search would be inadmissible under a Rodriguez
analysis, it was nonetheless admissible in Matthews’ case because the officers had acted in good
faith reliance on the law available at the time of the stop. Id. at 353. Jump to an indexed page (23 of 23)