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Search and Seizure — reasonable suspicion — vehicle color

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 13, 2013//

Search and Seizure — reasonable suspicion — vehicle color

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 13, 2013//

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Criminal

Search and Seizure — reasonable suspicion — vehicle color

Driving a car of one color with a registration number attached to a car of a different color does not give rise to reasonable suspicion that a driver is engaged in criminal activity.

“[T]he government provided no information on the correlation between stolen vehicles and repainted ones. We do not know whether ninety-nine percent of repainted cars are stolen, which would suggest a color discrepancy is highly probative of criminal activity, or whether less than one percent are, which would suggest a color discrepancy is completely innocuous. As we weigh Uribe’s Fourth Amendment rights against the benefits of using investigatory stops to catch car thieves and recover stolen vehicles, these numbers matter. Without them, we cannot conclude that a color discrepancy alone is probative of wrongdoing without the risk of subjecting a substantial number of innocent drivers and passengers to detention. See Reid v. Georgia, 448 U.S. 438, 441 (1980) (no reasonable suspicion where ‘circumstances describe a very large category of presumably innocent travelers, who would be subject to virtually random seizures were the Court to conclude that as little foundation as there was in this case could justify a seizure’).”

Affirmed.

11-3590 U.S. v. Uribe

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Magnus-Stinson, J., Williams, J.

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