Colorado Supreme Court People v. Mason 13SA49

Decision here.

   Officers were conducting surveillance on a house they believed to be involved in drug activity.  A pickup left the house.  Shortly afterwards, a deputy stopped the pickup for a couple of moving violations (as near as I can tell from the decision, the deputy wasn't involved in or aware of the surveillance).  The driver's license was also suspended.  An investigator heard the deputy call out the traffic stop, and let the deputy know that he had reasonable suspicion that the driver had just bought drugs.  

   The deputy wrote the driver (Mason) a ticket, but held onto his license and told him he wasn't free to go yet.  During the course of this stop, Mason refused to consent to a search of his truck, and was detained for an extra half hour after getting his ticket while the officers waited for a K9. The K9 arrived, alerted on the driver's door, and a subsequent search of the truck found meth.  Mason was arrested.

   Mason moved to suppress both the initial stop and his additional detention.  The district court found that his initial stop was justified.  The extra detention, though...  not so much.  The meth was suppressed as the fruit of an illegal detention, and the people filed an interlocutory appeal.

   So the "reasonable suspicion" mentioned by the investigator who overheard the traffic stop was based on two factors: 1- One of the residents of the house that Mason was coming from was involved in drug activity.  2: Two weeks prior, the investigator had talked to a woman who had been caught shoplifting whilst in possession of meth.  She had apparently mentioned Mason as being somehow involved in drug activity.

   The problem (or one of the problems, rather) with factor #1 is that there was never any testimony as to the basis of the investigator's knowledge that the resident of the house sold drugs.  It was just an bald assertion, which does nothing to establish reasonable suspicion.  One of the problems with factor #2 is that the information, even if it was reliable, was two weeks old.  There was nothing in the shoplifter's information to suggest that Mason would have drugs at the particular time and place that he was stopped two weeks later.

   Which brings us to the crux of the matter: "Reasonable suspicion that someone is involved in the illegal distribution of drugs is, in and of itself, insufficient to justify his investigative stop and detention whenever and wherever the police choose."  Or just because you know someone is usually up to something doesn't mean you can randomly stop them to see what they're up to today.  Reasonable suspicion is more of a here-and-now test.

   The Colorado Supreme Court upheld the suppression order.