What Happens When Police Don't Follow The Law?

Hey, everybody, this is Christine out with Just Criminal Law. And today I was going to talk to you a little bit about some of our more popular videos, specifically a couple that have gotten a lot of attention. One of them being, what are the five top things the cops don't want you to know? And what should you do if you come into contact with law enforcement? I wanted to highlight a real life case, and so I brought David Mann along here for the discussion. Hi, David. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. It's great to be here. Thank you. And David is a law firm consultant that we have worked with for almost a year. And he's had a chance to specifically look at one case we did. That being Devin Brown versus the state of Wyoming. So let's talk about that case today, David. Yeah, I think this is a good case to highlight the kind of work that you do and why it's important, which is why I thought it'd be great to talk about it. So this is a case about a traffic stop that ended up in front of the Wyoming Supreme Court right. And it ended up with a citizen, this Mr. Brown, defending, essentially defending his Fourth Amendment rights. And that's so it went from a traffic stop all the way to that. So for my understanding of what basically happened that led up to the moment of dispute was that a police officer noticed that that Mr. Brown was swerving on the road. And so he decided he needed to pull him over. And instead of pulling over, Mr. Brown pulled down into a dead end street and stopped at that point and then got out of the car. Or then then the officer walked up to the car. And at that point, a few things started to happen. That ended up really becoming problematic. So you just take the story from there. Tell us what happened next. Sure. So the officer asked Mr. Brown, my client, for his license and registration, and he went back to his car. He ran those and found out that Mr. Brown was on probation for possession of marijuana. And he decided, well, I'm not going to write him the traffic ticket and went back to give Mr. Brown his ID and started a conversation where Mr. Brown ultimately consented to the officer searching his vehicle. The officer said, okay, great. Went back, said, I'm going to go get my K-9 and I'm going to run him through the car. At that point, Mr. Brown said, Well, hold on, wait a minute, I'm going to need to call my mom. This is not my car. So why don't you let me do that and rather than wait for the telephone call to happen, essentially follow Mr. Brown's wishes. The officer just went ahead and got the dog and ran it around the vehicle. And sure enough, the dog alerts to an illegal substance and the officer finds marijuana in Mr. Brown's car. And so he actually had it in his car. And then what happened to Mr. Brown at that point? Mr. Brown was arrested. He was charged with a felony and hired our office to help him. Okay. So at that point, he was hired for or he was he was arrested for a felony charge. And Mr. Brown, I assume, is not a lawyer, right? Correct. Yes. So he went to he did not. He didn't know what to do in that instance. And he hired your office. And if I remember right from talking about this, that or from reading about it, then what happened is that he you found something that was wrong with what had happened with the officer. Right. And there was actually that it was it was not proper for Mr. Brown to have been arrested for a felony. So tell us about what actually went wrong on the officer's part. Sure. So the officer, you know, essentially ended the traffic stop when he returned Mr. Brown's I.D. to him. And Mr. Brown was free to leave at that point. Now, he wanted to continue to talk to him and ultimately was able to get consent from Mr. Brown to search his vehicle. But Mr. Brown withdrew that consent. And so at that point in time, Mr. Brown should have been free to go on his way. Right. Then contact Just Criminal Law by clicking the link in the description you can call text or chat with a member of my team any time, day or night. If you found this video helpful, there are many more on our website at JustCriminalLaw.com. You only get one shot at justice, so make yours count.