A person sitting in a parked car generally would not feel free to leave when an officer pulls up behind in a patrol car and activates emergency lights. Thus, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the person is detained at that point. So holds the Supreme Court today in a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Carol Corrigan in People v. Brown. The defendant in the case was detained, but his conviction is affirmed because the detention was supported by reasonable suspicion supplied by a 911 call, although the court finds that to be “a close question.”
The Supreme Court affirms the judgment of the the Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division One. However, the Court of Appeal’s decision on the main issue does not fare well — that court had concluded there was no detention by “merely activating emergency lights on a police vehicle.” The Supreme Court approves of a 1985 divided Sixth District Court of Appeal opinion, with which the Court of Appeal in today’s case had disagreed.
