That is a no-win path to walk down, I believe. Seems to me that once your license comes back as being a CHL, it is reasonable for the officer to ask if you are armed. If you lie, police officers are pretty good at spotting deception and lying to a police officer is in itself a crime. If you answer truthfully, now you have not given him your CHL when he asked for identification which is required by law even if there is no criminal penalty. (Note that carrying under MPA does not relieve you of the duty to provide the CHL when asked for ID.) In either scenario, there is a good argument that you have just created "reasonable articulable suspicion" (RAS) which applies during Terry stops.i8godzilla wrote:I know you are required to show your CHL, if armed, when asked for ID. However, in your automobile you are not carrying under the protection of your CHL--MPA covers you. Where in the law does it require you to:
1. Inform the officer you are armed?
2. Submit to a search and seizure?
With RAS, he doesn't even need state law for that. The Supreme Court has already laid out a number of cases dealing with police stops.
Once the Officer has stopped the vehicle, the SCOTUS has said that certain actions on the part of the police are permissible under the 4th Amendment.
- Pennsylvania v. Mimms (1977) – SCOTUS said that an Officer can order a driver out of the vehicle without any other justification other than the concern for the Officer’s safety: “The order to get out of the car, issued after the respondent was lawfully detained, was reasonable, and thus permissible under the Fourth Amendment. The State's proffered justification for such order -- the officer's safety -- is both legitimate and weighty, and the intrusion into respondent's personal liberty occasioned by the order, being, at most, a mere inconvenience, cannot prevail when balanced against legitimate concerns for the officer's safety.” http://supreme.justia.com/us/434/106/case.html
- Maryland v. Wilson (1997) – the SCOTUS extended Mimms to the passengers of the vehicle as well. They said: “On the public interest side, the same weighty interest in officer safety is present regardless of whether the occupant of the stopped car is a driver, as in Mimms, or a passenger, as here. Indeed, the danger to an officer from a traffic stop is likely to be greater when there are passengers in addition to the driver in the stopped car. On the personal liberty side, the case for passengers is stronger than that for the driver in the sense that there is probable cause to believe that the driver has committed a minor vehicular offense, but there is no such reason to stop or detain passengers. But as a practical matter, passengers are already stopped by virtue of the stop of the vehicle, so that the additional intrusion upon them is minimal.” http://supreme.justia.com/us/519/408/
Many people are under the misconception that a “search” of a vehicle requires PC. That not exactly correct. A limited search or “frisk” is permissible without PC under certain circumstances. In the case Michigan v. Long (1983) http://supreme.justia.com/us/463/1032/case.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;, the SCOTUS stated that an officer could search the lunge area of the vehicle (passenger compartment) for weapons if there is RAS that there is a weapon readily accessible in it. This decision goes hand in hand with the landmark Terry v. Ohio (1968) http://supreme.justia.com/us/392/1/case.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; decision which allows the frisk of a person for weapons based on RAS. The requirements set forth in Terry apply to the Long decision. The Officer must:
- Have articulable facts that the person could be armed
- Limit the search to areas in the vehicle which could readily conceal a weapon (i.e., they couldn’t search a film canister – which is commonly used to carry narcotics)