Chicago DUI attorney comments on the limits of a "Terry Stop"

This Chicago DUI attorney has posted here about suspended/revoked licenses and just how easy it is to be found guilty of this offense.  It looks like some Illinois courts are beginning to push back on the notion of many of my prosecuting friends and others who believe if you haven’t done anything wrong then there’s nothing wrong with letting an officer stop you.

In People of the State of Illinois v. Mario Galvez, No. 2-09-0216 the defendant was one of two registered owners of a vehicle.  In this instance the defendant’s license was revoked however the license of the co-owner (a woman, no less) was valid.  The officer didn’t see any bad driving and ascertained that one of the two owners of the vehicle had a revoked license based on conducting a random registration check.  The officer then decided that was enough to stop the vehicle.  The trial court’s ruling to the contrary was affirmed by the 2^nd District Court of Appeals:

The presence of a vehicle on the road is not suspicious merely because one of two co-owners is prohibited from driving; it is to be expected that the co-owner whose license is in force would continue to operate the vehicle. Thus, the State's argument essentially turns the "reasonable suspicion" standard on its head by starting with the assumption that defendant is likely to have committed a criminal act and working backward from that assumption to glean suspicion from otherwise innocuous circumstances. Perhaps the starting assumption would be permissible if there were empirical evidence to support it--evidence that, on the whole, drivers with revoked or suspended licenses routinely ignore the restrictions on their driving privileges. Here, however, the officer did not claim that he acted on the basis of such evidence or that he was familiar with defendant's individual driving habits. Simply put, the stop was based on nothing more than a guess that defendant was a scofflaw and that there was a good chance that he was behind the wheel.

 Of course you don’t want to be Mr. Galvez and have to go through an appeal in the first place.  There should be limits to a “Terry stop” and looks like the court is finally asking law enforcement to use a bit of commonsense to fortify their hunches.