Deputy Misread License Plate - November 20, 2023
- 8 months ago
On the day of November 20th, 2023, a Caldwell Parish, Louisiana sheriff's deputy ran a license plate on a pickup truck. He seemed to have had difficulty in reading one digit of the plate (most likely due to a trailer ball, but you won't get him to admit it) and read it as an 8 instead of a 0. The misread plate naturally returned to something different, giving him grounds to stop the vehicle.
Once he got the vehicle stopped he correctly read that one digit (which he also could've done by simply changing lanes on the 4-lane highway, but that would've blown his excuse for the stop), and the plate returned to the correct vehicle. He finally let the motorist go after running his driver's license and running a warrant check in several parishes.
I think we can all agree this was a bull-excrement stop, but was it lawful?
The digit of the plate the deputy misread sounded to have been in the right place to have a trailer ball in front of it. We've covered this before but for the new viewers: In 2022 the state of Iowa's appeals court heard a case in which a man was arrested for driving on a suspended license. The deputy who stopped him, used the trailer ball and "couldn't read" one digit as an excuse to make the pretextual stop. The court ruled that the trailer ball did not violate Iowa law and was not good legal grounds to make the stop. They ruled that the stop was unlawful, and thus the arrest was also unlawful. The relevant section of Louisiana's "display of plates" law is virtually identical to Iowa's. It's similar enough that the Iowa court's reasoning could be argued in Louisiana.
Bottom line: illegal traffic stop.
Once he got the vehicle stopped he correctly read that one digit (which he also could've done by simply changing lanes on the 4-lane highway, but that would've blown his excuse for the stop), and the plate returned to the correct vehicle. He finally let the motorist go after running his driver's license and running a warrant check in several parishes.
I think we can all agree this was a bull-excrement stop, but was it lawful?
The digit of the plate the deputy misread sounded to have been in the right place to have a trailer ball in front of it. We've covered this before but for the new viewers: In 2022 the state of Iowa's appeals court heard a case in which a man was arrested for driving on a suspended license. The deputy who stopped him, used the trailer ball and "couldn't read" one digit as an excuse to make the pretextual stop. The court ruled that the trailer ball did not violate Iowa law and was not good legal grounds to make the stop. They ruled that the stop was unlawful, and thus the arrest was also unlawful. The relevant section of Louisiana's "display of plates" law is virtually identical to Iowa's. It's similar enough that the Iowa court's reasoning could be argued in Louisiana.
Bottom line: illegal traffic stop.