Minnesota court: Uncertainty about Wisconsin registration tag doesn’t justify traffic stop

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The Minnesota Court of Appeals has held that officers cannot pull over a vehicle simply because they are uncertain about whether a temporary vehicle registration tag is valid because they can’t read it. The court concluded that an officer cannot initiate a traffic stop simply to satisfy one’s “idle curiosity” or on a “whim.”

Nicholas Engel was driving a van that did not have a rear license plate, but did have a valid temporary registration tag issued by Wisconsin that was affixed to the lower-left corner of the van’s rear window. A Thief River Falls police officer checked the status of the van’s vehicle registration and then noticed that the van did not have a rear license plate. The officer did see that there was a paper posted in the lower-left corner of the van’s rear window, but he could not discern if it was a temporary registration tag. The officer initiated a traffic stop.

However, Engel drove nearly 5 miles before he stopped the car. Despite seeing flashing lights and the officer telling Engel to pull over and stop multiple times, Engel continued to drive and insisted he would pull over later. He only stopped once he was surrounded by multiple law-enforcement vehicles that responded to assist.

Engel was charged with a felony for fleeing a peace officer in a motor vehicle. Engel’s attorney moved to suppress evidence, dismiss the charges, and compel discovery, but the motions were denied. After a three-day jury trial, Engel was found guilty. Engel was placed on unsupervised probation for two years.

On appeal, Engel claimed that the officer did not have reasonable, articulable suspicion to seize Engel.

“The police officer’s seizure here was based on a ‘whim’ and ‘idle curiosity’ as to whether the temporary tags were valid, which cannot be the basis for an investigatory stop,” Judge Jon Schmidt wrote. “The officer testified that he was unable to read the tag and articulated only uncertainty about whether the sign was a valid, temporary registration. Without more, the officer failed to offer specific and articulable facts to indicate that criminal activity was afoot.”

The court cited a 2018 8th U.S. Circuit case, U.S. v. McLemore, in which an officer stopped a vehicle after being unable to read a temporary registration tag. The panel found in that case that, without anything else, the inability to read the temporary registration card did not yield a particularized and objective basis to suspect the driver was engaged in lawbreaking. It reasoned that, if there was a contrary result, officers could stop a vehicle with a proper temporary registration tag whenever they were unable to read the card from inside their vehicle.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals concluded that the officer’s uncertainty about the validity of Engel’s displayed temporary vehicle registration tag, which he was unable to read, did not amount to reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity sufficient to justify an investigatory vehicle stop on its own.

However, the court did not agree with Engel that evidence of the 5-mile delay before stopping his vehicle should have been suppressed. It concluded that his prolonged and repeated flight from the officer was an intervening circumstance purging the taint of the illegal seizure.

Not every judge agreed on this point, however. Judge Jennifer Frisch cited the fact that Engel’s behavior of fleeing the officer was nonviolent and a foreseeable consequence of the officer’s unlawful seizure, and she disagreed with the finding that the state showed that the flight presented an intervening circumstance that was sufficient to purge the taint of unlawful police conduct. “[O]ur caselaw has repeatedly addressed circumstances involving the act of fleeing a police officer in response to unlawful police conduct, which underscores that such a response is unsurprising,” Frisch wrote.

As a result of the appellate ruling, Engel remains on two years of unsupervised probation, which commenced in December 2023.

Related:

State v. Engel

U.S. v. McLemore