Target of police light is free to leave

If the police shine a spotlight on you, it means they have their eye on you. But it doesn’t mean you have to stop and answer questions, and if you do it’s your own choice.

That’s the conclusion of a state appeals court that upheld a Solano County youth’s conviction for drunken driving after an encounter with a law enforcement light beam.

Sheriff’s deputies responded to a report of a disturbance at Belden’s Landing in Suisun City one night in June 2011 and saw a pickup truck pulling out of a parking lot. Officer Loren Thomson shone his patrol car spotlight on the pickup, it stopped, and Thomson approached and smelled marijuana and alcohol.

He also saw an open can of beer and noticed that the driver, a juvenile identified as H.M., had red, watery eyes. Thomson told H.M. to step out of the truck, then searched and handcuffed him. The boy was eventually placed on probation.

H.M. appealed his conviction, arguing that the search and arrest were illegal because the officer detained him, for no good reason, by shining the spotlight on his truck. This month, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said the stop was entirely voluntary.

“The use of a spotlight without more does not convert a consensual encounter into a detention,” Justice Maria Rivera said in the 3-0 ruling.

She cited another appeals court’s 1987 ruling that reached the same conclusion when an officer had turned on his high beams and spotlights, stationed his patrol car in front of the defendant’s car, shone his flashlight inside, and asked the defendant to roll down the window.

Such actions “may cause a reasonable person to feel himself the object of official scrutiny,” but they don’t amount to coercion or an official detention, the 1987 court said.

In this case, Rivera said, Thomson didn’t physically restrain H.M., pull out his gun, activate his siren or order him to stop. That means, she said, that a reasonable person in the youth’s position would have believed — spotlight or not — that he was free to leave.