Background
On June 19, 2024, a North Dakota Highway Patrol trooper stopped Jodi Cooper after observing her 1993 Chevrolet Silverado drifting across the center line on Highway 20 south of Devils Lake. Cooper had two young children in the vehicle. During the stop the trooper observed that Cooper was shaking, unable to sit still, and had bloodshot, watery, and severely constricted eyes. After running a license check and learning her license was suspended, he asked her to step to the front of his patrol vehicle. There, Cooper admitted she had smoked a marijuana joint a few hours earlier and refused consent to search the vehicle. Approximately eleven minutes into the stop, after Cooper defied the trooper’s instruction to put down her phone, he handcuffed her and placed her in his patrol car on suspicion of driving under the influence.
While attending to the children — waiting for a parent to arrive and take custody of them — and while administering field sobriety tests (which Cooper passed without alcohol-impairment clues), the trooper also called for a K-9 unit. After two handlers were unavailable, an off-duty Ramsey County deputy responded and arrived while the trooper was still drafting a citation for driving under suspension. The deputy’s dog gave a “soft indication” on the passenger side of the vehicle. The ensuing search uncovered a glass pipe with suspected methamphetamine residue, marijuana, and a marijuana smoking device. A further search at the jail following Cooper’s arrest yielded an additional marijuana pipe.
Cooper was charged with unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia (class A misdemeanor), endangerment of a child or vulnerable adult (class C felony), driving under suspension (class B misdemeanor), and two marijuana-related infractions. She moved to suppress all pre-arrest statements and evidence from the vehicle and jail searches. The district court denied the motion after an evidentiary hearing, and Cooper entered a conditional guilty plea on the paraphernalia and child-endangerment counts, preserving her right to appeal the suppression ruling.
The Court’s Holding
The North Dakota Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Fair McEvers, affirmed the denial of the motion to suppress on all three grounds Cooper raised. First, the Court held that Cooper was not subjected to unlawful custodial interrogation when she admitted to smoking marijuana. Her admission occurred before she was handcuffed and placed in the patrol car — that is, before any plausible point of “custody” — during an ordinary investigatory traffic stop at which Miranda warnings were not yet required. The Court emphasized that ordering a driver out of a vehicle for officer safety or to address a traffic violation does not convert a stop into custodial interrogation, and that even assuming custody attached when she was handcuffed, Cooper identified no other statements made after that point that should have been suppressed.
Second, the Court held that the trooper did not impermissibly extend the stop to engineer the arrival of the K-9 unit. Considering the totality of the circumstances, the trooper had reasonable and articulable suspicion of drug impairment — grounded in Cooper’s erratic driving, physical symptoms (shaking, pacing, constricted and bloodshot eyes), prior drug history, and her own admission — sufficient to justify continued detention beyond the initial traffic-infraction mission. The delay was further explained by the legitimate need to arrange for the children’s parents to take custody of the minors, during which the trooper was also conducting field sobriety tests and preparing a citation. The K-9 sniff was completed while those stop-related tasks were still ongoing.
Third, the Court upheld the vehicle search under the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, because the K-9’s positive alert on the vehicle established probable cause. The Court also rejected Cooper’s challenge to the dog’s “soft indication,” noting she offered no expert or other evidence to rebut the deputy’s account of the alert. Finally, the Court summarily rejected the claim that items found during the jail search must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree, because Cooper had been lawfully arrested and was lawfully detained, independently justifying a search incident to arrest and an inventory search.
Key Takeaways
- A driver’s admission of recent drug use made during the investigatory phase of a routine traffic stop — before handcuffing and formal detention — does not require a prior Miranda warning, because the stop is not yet “custodial” for Miranda purposes.
- A traffic stop is not unconstitutionally prolonged when the additional time is attributable to legitimate stop-related tasks (issuing citations, arranging care for minor passengers, conducting field sobriety tests), even if a K-9 unit happens to arrive during that period.
- Reasonable articulable suspicion of drug impairment can rest on the totality of observable physical indicators — erratic driving, nervousness, trembling, unusual eye characteristics, and a voluntary admission of recent use — without requiring the driver to fail standardized field sobriety tests.
- A K-9’s “soft indication” on a vehicle is sufficient to establish probable cause for a warrantless search under the automobile exception, absent credible contrary evidence.
- Evidence found during a booking search at a detention facility is independently admissible as a search incident to a lawful arrest and need not be analyzed under the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine when the underlying arrest was lawful.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the broad investigatory latitude North Dakota courts afford law enforcement during traffic stops involving suspected drug impairment. By confirming that Miranda warnings are not triggered until a formal arrest or its functional equivalent — and that pre-handcuffing admissions during a roadside investigation remain admissible — the case provides a clear marker for both officers and defense counsel on when constitutional protections attach. The opinion also underscores that the “mission of the stop” is interpreted holistically: attending to minor passengers and conducting field sobriety tests count as stop-related duties that legitimately consume time, reducing the window in which a defendant can argue the stop was artificially prolonged to await a drug dog.
For practitioners, the case illustrates the difficulty of mounting a successful suppression challenge when multiple independent bases support both continued detention (reasonable suspicion of DUI) and the ultimate search (K-9 alert establishing probable cause). Defense challenges to a drug dog’s alert face a high evidentiary bar: absent expert testimony or other concrete evidence of handler manipulation or unreliable alert methodology, courts will credit the handler’s account of the dog’s behavior.