State Supreme Court rules unanimously in case stemming from 2020 traffic stop
The Illinois Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Illinois law enforcement officers cannot search vehicles without a warrant based solely on the odor of burnt marijuana.
The decision was unanimous, although Justice Lisa Holder White did not join in. In her opinion for the court, Justice P. Scott Neville pointed to Illinois' landmark 2019 law that legalized marijuana for recreational use and decriminalized possession of up to 30 grams of marijuana.
“Marijuana laws have changed dramatically, and the odor of burnt marijuana alone is no longer sufficient grounds for a police officer to search a vehicle without a warrant,” Judge Neville wrote in his 20-page opinion.
The case began when Ryan Redmond was stopped by an Illinois State Police trooper on Interstate 80 in Henry County, just east of the Quad Cities, in September 2020. According to court documents, Redmond's license plates were not properly secured to his vehicle and he was allegedly driving three miles over the speed limit.
However, during the interaction, officers smelled burnt marijuana inside Redmond's vehicle and after searching the vehicle, they found approximately one gram of marijuana in the center console, according to the complaint.
Redmond was later charged with a misdemeanor of failing to transport marijuana in an odor-proof container.
The court found that the officers' detection of the odor of “burnt marijuana” in the car “credibly established reasonable suspicion for further investigation,” but noted that the officers' further investigation did not yield anything beyond that, including any indication that Redmond's driving ability was impaired. Therefore, Judge Neville wrote, the officers' reasonable suspicion should not have risen to “probable cause for a search.”
While the court accepted that the officers' initial suspicion that Redmond had “smoked cannabis in the vehicle at some point” was not improbable, Judge Neville noted that not only did the officers “observe no signs of impairment,” but upon further investigation they also found no drug paraphernalia or evidence of cannabis use in the vehicle.
“The officers also did not smell any odor of burnt marijuana inside Redmond's vehicle, which weakens the reasonable belief that Redmond had recently smoked marijuana in his vehicle while traveling on an Illinois highway,” the ruling read.
The court heard Redmond's case in January, but also heard arguments in a related case that focused on a provision of Illinois law that requires marijuana to be stored in sealed, odor-proof containers when transported in a vehicle.
In that case, an Illinois State Police trooper stopped a vehicle for speeding in rural Whiteside County, also near the Quad Cities, and arrested the vehicle's passenger for illegal possession of marijuana. According to court records, Vincent Molina was arrested in December 2020 after officers smelled raw marijuana in the car, searched it and found a packet of rolled joints, even though Molina told officers he had a medical marijuana card.
The Supreme Court heard those cases in consolidated arguments earlier this year, but the justices only ruled on the Redmond case on Thursday. The decision briefly mentioned the Molina case in a footnote, noting that the Redmond decision did not address “the validity of the odor-resistant container requirement.”
Ahead of the joint oral arguments in January, the national and state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Lawyers filed a brief supporting Molina and Redmond, writing that allowing the odor of marijuana as reason to search vehicles would lead to disproportionate policing of Black and Latino residents in Illinois.
“There has been a decades-long pattern of police in this state unfairly stopping and searching black and Latino drivers on pretexts such as the odor of marijuana,” the report said. Illinois' stop-and-search policies “disproportionately subject[black and Latino drivers]to invasion of privacy and reduce them to second-class citizens.”
These groups argued that legalizing marijuana meant its presence did not indicate smuggling or criminality.
Thursday's ruling cited a Kansas Supreme Court decision from earlier this year and noted that other states have agreed. Other state high courts, including Minnesota, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Vermont, have also issued similar rulings, while the Wisconsin Supreme Court disagreed in a 2023 decision.
Other states have passed laws banning warrantless searches of vehicles based solely on the odor of marijuana, but a similar effort in Illinois stalled last year while the Redmond v. Molina case was pending.
Contributed by Dilpreet Raju
