Recent North Carolina Case on Lack of Reasonable Suspicion to Make Vehicle Stop

Although reasonable suspicion requires less evidence than probable cause and often is not a difficult standard for an officer to satisfy to make an investigative stop, the standard requires an articulation of facts that is more than a mere hunch or suspicion. An example of the latter is last week’s North Carolina Court of Appeals opinion in State v. Watson (November 15, 2016), which ruled that an officer lacked reasonable suspicion to make a vehicle stop for illegal drugs. This post discusses the reasonable suspicion standard as applied in this case. State v. Watson. The defendant was convicted of several drug offenses. He argued on appeal that the trial court erred in denying the defendant’s suppression motion, which contended that an officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop his vehicle. The court of appeals reversed the trial court. Officers received a tip from a confidential informant concerning “suspicious” packages that the defendant had received from a local UPS store. The informant was an employee of a UPS store who had been trained to detect narcotics. He had notified law enforcement on prior occasions about packages later found to contain illegal drugs, and these tips were successfully used to secure a number of felony drug convictions. Concerning this case, the informant advised law enforcement that a man, later identified as the defendant, had arrived at the UPS store in a truck with another person and retrieved four packages with a Utah return address, when in fact the packages had been sent [...]