As Long as a Police Officer’s Mistake is “Objectively Reasonable,” a Stop Based Upon the Mistake Will Not Be Invalidated/There Is No Analytical Distinction Between a Mistake of Law and a Mistake of Fact in this Context

The Court of Appeals, in a full-fledged opinion by Judge Stein, over a dissent, determined that a police officer’s objectively reasonable mistake about the law will not invalidate a stop based upon that mistake.  Here the defendant was stopped by the police after she rolled through a stop sign at the exit of a supermarket parking lot.  The defendant was ultimately arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated.  It turned out that the stop sign, although regulation size and color, was not registered with the town and was therefore not “legally authorized.” The local court dismissed the charges, finding the initial vehicle stop, based upon a mistake of law, improper. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding the mistake of law was “objectively reasonable.”  The court noted that a police officer cannot be expected to know the location of every “unregistered” stop sign in his/her jurisdiction. The court made it clear, in deciding whether the actions taken by the police were objectively reasonable, there should be no distinction between mistakes of fact and mistakes of law:

…[W]e look to the reasonableness of the officer’s belief that defendant violated the Vehicle and Traffic Law, without drawing any distinction between mistakes of fact and mistakes of law. * * * … [W]e are not saying that it would have been objectively reasonable for the arresting officer to have claimed ignorance of the requirement in Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1100 (b) that a stop sign in a parking lot be registered to be valid. We are saying that the stop was nonetheless constitutionally justified because the officer was not chargeable with knowing each and every stop sign that was registered under the Newark Village Code.  People v Guthrie, 2015 NY Slip Op 02867, CtApp 4-7-15