State v. Fuller

296 Or.App. 425

438 P.3d 431

STATE of Oregon, Plaintiff-Respondent,

v.Jeffrey Earl FULLER, Defendant-Appellant.

A162334

Court of Appeals of Oregon.

Submitted December 5, 2017.

March 6, 2019

Ernest G. Lannet, Chief Defender, Criminal Appellate Section, and Anna Melichar, Deputy Public Defender, Office of Public Defense Services, filed the brief for appellant.

Ellen F. Rosenblum, Attorney General, Benjamin Gutman, Solicitor General, and Robert M. Wilsey, Assistant Attorney General, filed the brief for respondent.

Before DeHoog, Presiding Judge, and Egan, Chief Judge, and Aoyagi, Judge.

DEHOOG, P. J.

Defendant appeals a judgment of conviction entered after a jury found him guilty of unlawfully transporting special forest products, ORS 164.813(3).¹ Defendant assigns error to the trial court’s denial of his motion to suppress, arguing that the court erred in concluding that the sheriff’s deputy who stopped defendant as he was driving his truck reasonably suspected that he was committing that offense. We agree with defendant that the deputy lacked reasonable suspicion to detain him and, therefore, the trial court erred in denying defendant’s motion to suppress. Accordingly, we reverse and remand.

We review a trial court’s denial of a motion to suppress for legal error. State v. Maciel-Figueroa , 361 Or. 163, 165, 389 P.3d 1121 (2017). We are bound by the court’s factual findings if there is constitutionally sufficient evidence in the record to support them. Id. at 165-66, 389 P.3d 1121. If the court did not enter express findings and there is "evidence from which the trial court could have found a fact in more than one way, we will presume that the trial court decided the facts consistently" with its ultimate legal conclusion. Id. at 166, 389 P.3d 1121.

At the suppression hearing, Deputy Childers of the Crook County Sheriff’s Office testified that he had observed a truck driving through downtown Prineville at approximately 2:15 a.m. The truck was hauling approximately three-quarters of a cord of cut wood rounds. Childers saw that there were no landowner or government-issued firewood tags attached to the load, which he understood ORS 164.813(3) to require. Childers testified that, based on his training and experience, he knows that often individuals will cut firewood in the forest during the day but wait until later at night to retrieve it. Frequently those people are found to have removed that firewood from the forest without having a permit or other authority to transport the wood.² Because defendant did not appear to have a permit posted on the firewood in the manner Childers associated with the lawful transport of forest products, Childers believed that he had reasonable suspicion to stop defendant’s truck to investigate whether he had violated ORS 164.813(3).

Defendant was the driver and sole occupant of the truck. When Childers asked defendant about the wood in the back of his truck, defendant acknowledged that he had taken it from the forest. When asked whether he had a permit for the firewood, defendant said that he did, but that he had left the permit at home. After obtaining those responses, Childers ran a background check on defendant and discovered that he had been driving with a suspended license. As a result, Childers cited defendant both for driving while suspended and unlawfully transporting special forest products.

Before his trial on the unlawful transport charge, defendant moved to suppress the evidence obtained as a result of the stop, arguing that Childers had lacked reasonable suspicion to justify stopping him. During the suppression hearing, the trial court asked Childers whether he had been able to tell what kind of wood defendant had been hauling. As Childers began responding that it had not been juniper or tamarack, defendant interjected to say that it had been fir. Childers agreed, saying, "Yeah, I was going to say fir. It was good fir, not yellow fir."

The trial court ultimately denied defendant’s motion to suppress. The court explained:

"In this case, it was 2 o'clock at night. The officer, with the help of the defendant, identified the wood as fir and indicated that that’s what you get in the forest. So I'm going to deny the motion to suppress. I think he had reasonable suspicion to stop the vehicle. I think it was objectively reasonable."

A jury subsequently found defendant guilty, and the court entered a judgment of conviction. Defendant appeals.

As he did at the suppression hearing, defendant argues on appeal that Childers did not reasonably suspect that defendant had committed or was about to commit any specific crime. The stop, defendant argues, therefore violated Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution. More specifically, defendant argues that Childers lacked a reasonable basis to suspect that he was transporting the firewood without a permit in violation of ORS 164.813(3). According to defendant, the text and context of that statute indicate that a permit is required only if "a person transports firewood directly away from a harvest or collection site and the person does not own the land from which the wood was harvested and removed." Thus, to reasonably suspect a violation of that statute, an officer must be aware of specific and articulable facts connecting the wood being transported with such a location and supporting an inference that the wood is being transported directly away from that site. In defendant’s view, Childers’s testimony supported neither belief, and, therefore, the trial court erred in concluding that Childers had had reasonable suspicion to detain him.

In response, the state argues that the trial court properly concluded that reasonable suspicion supported the stop. More specifically, the observations Childers described—the time of night, the type of wood, and the absence of a visible permit—were sufficient to render his suspicion that defendant was violating ORS 164.813(3) objectively reasonable.

Under Article I, section 9, an officer may stop a person to make a reasonable inquiry if the officer reasonably suspects that the person has committed or is about to commit a crime. Maciel-Figueroa , 361 Or. at 171-72, 389 P.3d 1121 (recognizing that the standards for reasonable suspicion under ORS 131.615 and ORS 131.605 inform Article I, section 9, analysis). "Reasonably suspects" means "a belief that is reasonable under the totality of the circumstances existing at the time and place the peace officer acts ***." ORS 131.605(4). Put differently,

"the established standard for reasonable suspicion supporting an investigatory stop of a defendant is met when an officer can point to specific and articulable facts that give rise to a reasonable inference that the defendant committed or was about to commit a specific crime or type of crime."

Maciel-Figueroa , 361 Or. at 165, 389 P.3d 1121. The articulated facts need not support certainty that a suspect is engaged in criminal activity; rather, based on those specific facts, "a reviewing court must [be able to] conclude that the officer’s subjective belief could be true, as a matter of logic." Id. at 184, 389 P.3d 1121 (emphasis in original).

To determine whether Childers reasonably suspected defendant of violating ORS 164.813(3), we must first determine what that statute requires. Specifically, we must construe the meaning of "transport" under that statute, applying the principles set out in State v. Gaines , 346 Or. 160, 206 P.3d 1042 (2009), and PGE v. Bureau of Labor and Industries , 317 Or. 606, 859 P.2d 1143 (1993). See State v. Lively , 294 Or. App. 377, 380, 430 P.3d 1120 (2018) (analyzing the meaning of "remove" under ORS 164.813 by applying Gaines and PGE ). That is, we first consider the text of the statute in context; then, to the extent that we might find it helpful, we may consider any relevant legislative history that the parties provide or that we discover ourselves. Gaines , 346 Or. at 171-72, 206 P.3d 1042.

The special forest products statute, ORS 164.813, makes certain conduct illegal if the person engaging in that conduct does not possess a permit. The subsection under which defendant was cited provides, in relevant part:

"[I]t is unlawful for a person to transport special forest products without possessing a permit *** or a document of sale showing title to the special forest products."

ORS 164.813(3). The statute also provides a number of definitions. For example, ORS 164.813(1)(b) defines "Special forest products" as including "Firewood[.]" Pertinent to our discussion, ORS 164.813(1)(d) defines "Transportation," in part, as

"the physical conveyance of special forest products away from a harvest or collection site and includes, but is not limited to, transportation in or on *** [a] motor vehicle[.]"

Defendant asserts, based on that statutory text, that a permit is required only when a person is moving special forest products directly away from a harvest or collection site, rather than at any time a person moves those products from one place to another. Thus, for an officer to reasonably suspect a violation of the statute, the officer must be aware of specific and articulable facts (1) connecting a load of wood to a harvest or collection site for which a permit is required and (2) indicating that the person is hauling that load directly away from such a site.

The plain text of ORS 164.813 supports defendant’s interpretation, and nothing about the statute’s context suggests otherwise. That is, the statutory definition of "transportation" in ORS 164.813(1)(d) does not refer to all conveyances of special forest products, but only "the physical conveyance of special forest products away from a harvest or collection site [.]" (Emphasis added.) To be sure, "harvest" is defined rather broadly and is not expressly limited to gathering forest products from a forest.³ Furthermore, the permit required under ORS 164.813(3) must include a "description of the premises from which the special forest products were taken,"...