After being indicted for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, Sonia Rodriguez filed a pre-trial motion to suppress the marijuana found by police when an officer stopped the vehicle she was driving and searched the vehicle pursuant to her consent. In this interlocutory appeal from the trial court’s denial of the motion, Rodriguez claims that her consent was involuntary and the search was illegal under the Fourth Amendment because: 1 there was no valid basis for the initial vehicle stop, and 2 even if the initial stop was valid, police searched the vehicle pursuant to an impermissible expansion of the scope and duration of the stop. We find that the trial court correctly denied the motion to suppress and affirm.
A police officer stopped the vehicle driven by Rodriguez based on information provided to the officer by an automatic license plate recognition LPR system. The LPR system used cameras mounted on the officer’s marked police car to record images of license plates on passing vehicles, including the white Chevrolet Impala driven by Rodriguez. The LPR system transmitted an image of the Impala’s license plate to a computer which automatically compared the license plate characters to a Georgia Bureau of Investigation database of outstanding arrest warrants. As the Impala passed by the officer’s car, the LPR system alerted the officer that Enrique Sanchez, born on August 24, 1987, was wanted on an outstanding arrest warrant for failure to appear in court on citations issued to Sanchez while driving the Impala with the displayed license plate. Based on the alert showing that Sanchez was the subject of an outstanding arrest warrant and had previously driven the passing Impala, the officer radioed other officers with information about the alert and pursued and stopped the vehicle.
