State v. Turnage and Determining When a Defendant is Seized

A Fourth Amendment seizure does not occur when an officer turns on her patrol vehicle’s lights and siren to signal for a vehicle to stop. Instead, it occurs when a driver submits to that show of authority by stopping the car. Thus, if an officer lacks reasonable suspicion when she activates the siren, but gathers information sufficient to constitute reasonable suspicion by the time the vehicle stops, the traffic stop does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. But what if the car is already stopped when the officer turns on the blue lights and siren? Have the occupants of the car then been seized for purposes of the Fourth Amendment? Not necessarily, as the court of appeals recently explained in State v. Turnage, __ N.C. App. ___ (May 15, 2018). Background. The United States Supreme Court held in California v. Hodari D., 499 U.S. 621 (1991) that a person is seized for Fourth Amendment purposes when (1) an officer applies physical force, however slight, to the person or (2) the person submits to an officer’s show of authority. In Hodari D., two patrol officers approached a group of young men huddled around a car. The young men ran when they saw the officers’ car approach, and the car around which they had been gathered sped away. One of the officers pursued the juvenile, Hodari, on foot, proceeding down a parallel street and cutting off his flight head-on. When the juvenile saw the officer running toward him, he discarded a rock [...]