After his arrest in Spalding County on various drug and traffic offenses, Stephen Ralph Bibbins filed a motion to suppress evidence found during the traffic stop of his vehicle. The record in this case reveals that at the hearing on Bibbins’ motion, the parties presented no testimony, submitted no evidence and entered into no stipulations regarding the evidence. Instead, the parties argued over which of two lines of cases out of the Court of Appeals set forth the law applicable to the case. The trial court heard the argument but made no decision regarding the applicable law. Instead, the trial court stated that because the legal issue “needs to be straightened out,” it would “just make the decision and give y’all interlocutory appeal and let you take it up there on appeal and straighten it out.” After defense counsel suggested that the parties “flip and see which one of us is going to have a head start going up” on appeal, the trial court instead decided it would “grant the motion to suppress and ask the State, please to appeal —because that way it’s not interlocutory.” The hearing concluded with the court and counsel all agreeing that although “it’s an adversarial system . . . we’re together wanting to know what the answers are” and that granting the motion would “be the way to do this” in order to obtain “definitive answers on all of it.” In their briefs to the Court of Appeals the parties “stipulated” to certain facts they agreed were “representative of the facts” that would be adduced at trial and presented their legal arguments premised upon the trial court’s “grant” of the motion to suppress. The parties did not raise the procedural status of their case and the majority opinion rendered by the Court of Appeals makes no mention of it, instead attributing to the trial court legal conclusions that court did not make and undertaking its own review of the facts, including an assessment of evidence neither presented to the trial court nor included in the parties’ stipulation on appeal. State v. Bibbins , 271 Ga. App. 90 609 SE2d 362 2004. Only one Court of Appeals judge, in a solo dissent, raised a “question” regarding the posture of the case on appeal. Id. at 108 and 111 5 Adams, J., dissenting. Bibbins thereafter petitioned this Court for a writ of certiorari arguing that the Court of Appeals had “totally overlooked, misconstrued, and misapplied certain facts contained in the record and controlling authorities which require a different result.” Consistent with the parties’ desire to have the legal issue “straightened out” on appeal, no question was raised by Bibbins in his petition regarding the posture of the case.
We granted the writ of certiorari and posed a question that focused exclusively on legal issues raised by the majority opinion in the Court of Appeals. However, as we have recently reiterated, “the posing of questions in no way limits this Court in its decision-making authority. Having the case before us, in its discretion this Court can consider any matter presented to or decided by the Court of Appeals. On certiorari, the case comes before us, not an isolated issue in the case.” Citations and punctuation omitted. Security Life Ins. Co. v. St. Paul Fire &c. Co. , 278 Ga. 800, 801-802 2 606 SE2d 855 2004. We now conclude that the case before us, as presented to the Court of Appeals, was fatally flawed and that the Court of Appeals erred by entertaining an appeal from a ruling in which no conclusions of law were made and no facts of any nature found by the trial court. Georgia appellate courts are not authorized to render advisory opinions as to potential error. See generally Height v. State , 278 Ga. 592 2 604 SE2d 796 2004; State v. Adams , 270 Ga. App. 878 3 609 SE2d 378 2004. It is inappropriate to render an advisory opinion whether that opinion is sought directly or, as in the case here, sought indirectly by means of a ruling entered solely to obtain an appellate court ruling on a difficult area of the law. An appellate court should not reconstruct a legal basis for a trial court’s ruling, consider unstipulated evidence never introduced in the trial court, or substitute itself as the initial finder of fact to reach an issue not properly before it, no matter how much confusion that issue has generated in the ” ‘real world.’ ” State v. Bibbins , supra at 91.
