Pubdate: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 Source: Bergen Record (NJ) Copyright: 2000 Bergen Record Corp. Contact: http://www.bergen.com/cgi-bin/feedback Website: http://www.bergen.com/ Author: Ralph Siegel, The Associated Press MIRANDA RULING DOESN'T ALWAYS APPLY IN TRAFFIC STOPS TRENTON -- Police officers need not recite so-called Miranda rights before questioning the occupants of every car they pull over, a state appeals court has ruled. The opinion, released Tuesday, brings New Jersey in line with a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said the Miranda ruling does not automatically apply during traffic stops. The new ruling arose from a 1999 incident in which a police officer bluntly asked two men whether they were carrying contraband, and a passenger produced a packet of drugs. When the case came to trial in Gloucester County, Judge Martin Herman threw out the evidence because, he said, the suspects should have been made aware of their rights to remain silent and to seek the help of an attorney, as outlined in the 1966 Miranda ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1984 the Supreme Court ruled that the Miranda warning does not automatically apply in traffic situations. Herman's ruling in the 1999 New Jersey case differed from the high court's opinion, and for that reason the case went to a three-member appeals panel. In overturning the Herman decision, the panel reviewed the January 1999 drug arrest, in which a Westville police officer stopped two men in a car on a license violation. "Have you got something on you that you should surrender right now? Any contraband, weapons, anything like that?" the officer said. Daniel Hickman Jr., a passenger, produced a packet of cocaine and was arrested. In court later, Herman said the question and the environment -- a car on the side of the road with a patrol car behind it, lights flashing -- was a coercive one that required the Miranda warning. "Field inquiry means being more gentle," Herman wrote. "The officer is basically compelling and demanding information in which this defendant knew he had no reason to believe that he was free to get out of that car and walk away," Herman said. But in the opinion issued Tuesday, Appellate Division Judge Stephen Skillman said the officer was within his rights to ask the question, to take the drugs, and to apply them as evidence. Skillman reversed Herman's findings and ordered that Hickman stand trial. Skillman said that a traffic stop is not the same as a session in a police station interrogation room, because a person does not know how long such an interrogation is going to take. The coercion in a police interrogation is compounded by the implication the questioning will not end until some answers are produced. None of this exists on a roadside, Skillman said, where the occupants of a vehicle subject to a traffic stop expect that as soon as the officer is finished with paperwork, they will be free to go. "Roadside questioning of a motorist is not transformed into custodial interrogation that must be preceded by Miranda warnings simply because a police officer's questioning is accusatory in nature or designed to elicit incriminating evidence," Skillman wrote. "When defendant was asked these questions, he was not in a hostile or intimidating atmosphere. He was simply sitting in a car that had been stopped." - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D