Third Court of Appeals Criminal Update

The following is a summary of a selected criminal opinion issued by the Third Court of Appeals from January 2023. The summary is an overview; please review the entire opinion. The subsequent history is current as of May 31, 2023.

SEARCH AND SEIZURE – NATURE OF POLICE ENCOUNTER: Trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying DWI defendant’s motion to suppress evidence obtained during encounter with police.

Williams v. State, No. 03-2100029-CR (Tex. App.—Austin Jan. 27, 2023, no pet.) (mem. op., not designated for publication).

Williams was charged with driving while intoxicated and filed a motion to suppress the evidence. At the suppression hearing, the trial court heard evidence that, on the morning of his arrest, Williams’s neighbor called 911 and reported that she believed Williams had been drinking and driving. Officer John Bowman of the Lampasas Police Department was on patrol when dispatch provided him with the description of the vehicle and advised him that the driver was possibly intoxicated. Bowman found a vehicle “consistent with” the description given by dispatch that was parked in a nearby gas-station parking lot and saw that the vehicle’s brake lights were activated. Bowman pulled into the parking lot and positioned his car to block other vehicles from entering.

When Bowman approached the vehicle and contacted Williams, he could smell a strong odor of alcohol coming from his person, observed that Williams’s speech was slow and slurred, and noticed that Williams seemed “disoriented or confused.” While Bowman was questioning Williams, a second officer, Lieutenant Charles Montgomery, arrived to assist with the investigation. After conducting field sobriety tests on Williams, the officers arrested him for driving while intoxicated.

Williams testified that he had not been drinking on the morning of his arrest, that his neighbor could not have seen him drinking, that he did not see her when he was driving, and that, although he had been drinking the night before, he felt that he was no longer intoxicated that morning. Williams also testified that he did not feel free to leave when Bowman approached, did not feel that he could tell Bowman that he did not wish to speak with him, and did not feel that he could have backed up without hitting Bowman.

He further testified that, when Bowman entered the lot, he had just gotten back into his truck and was preparing to back out when he saw the squad car in his rearview mirror. Montgomery testified initially that he believed Williams would have been able to leave the parking lot by reversing his truck, going around Bowman’s car, and exiting through the unblocked driveway of the parking lot. However, he later testified that he did not know if Williams would have been able to back up. In addition to the testimonies of Bowman, Montgomery, and Williams, a video recording of the stop was admitted into evidence. Following the hearing, the trial court denied Williams’s motion to suppress and later made findings of fact and conclusions of law. One of the issues that Williams raised on appeal was that his initial interaction with Bowman was an investigatory detention, and Bowman lacked reasonable suspicion to detain him.

The appellate court affirmed the denial of the motion to suppress. The opinion provides an excellent summary of the law on consensual encounters. The court concluded that the initial interaction between Bowman and Williams was consensual and did not rise to the level of a detention. The court observed that what constitutes a sufficient restraint on liberty to implicate the Fourth Amendment will vary depending on the circumstances. Here, Bowman parked his car in such a way as to block only one entrance to the parking lot, neither the car’s siren nor its overhead lights was activated, and the trial court found that it would have been possible for Williams to drive around Bowman’s car if he had chosen to do so.

Also, during their initial interaction, Bowman approached the driver’s side of Williams’s truck and spoke to him “in a friendly tone” through the window, which was already lowered, and Bowman “did not draw his service weapon, wield a flashlight, or make any commands.” Moreover, there was no evidence that Bowman physically touched Williams, ordered him to remove the keys from the ignition, or utilized the squad car’s spotlight or loudspeaker. Further, “Officer Bowman never told Williams that he was not free to leave, and Williams never attempted to do so.”

Finally, the court concluded that “the subjective beliefs of both the officers and Williams are irrelevant to our inquiry.” Thus, it was irrelevant that Williams did not feel free to leave and that the officers believed it might have been difficult for Williams to leave. AL

Zak Hall is a staff attorney for the Third Court of Appeals. The summary below represents the views of the author alone and does not reflect the views of the court or any of the individual Justices on the court.