Foley, J.
In this interlocutory appeal, Avis Deforest White challenges the trial court’s denial of his motion to suppress evidence stemming from a traffic stop. Police stopped White’s car when an officer ran White’s license plate and received a return from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (“BMV”) listing the car’s registration as “inactive.” Because we observe that the General Assembly has not made “inactive” registration an infraction, we conclude that the traffic stop was not justified by reasonable suspicion and was, therefore, impermissible. Accordingly, we reverse the ruling of the trial court.
White raises a single issue: whether the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress.
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White contends that the trial court erred in concluding that Corporal Nelson had the requisite reasonable suspicion to affect a traffic stop.
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A person operating a motor vehicle must both register the vehicle and maintain proof of registration. See Ind. Code § 9-18.1-2-3.4 “A certificate of registration or proof of registration issued under IC 9-18 (before its expiration on December 31, 2016) remains valid until it expires or is revoked, suspended, or canceled.” I.C. § 9-18.1-2-1(b) (emphasis added). The Indiana Code makes clear that each of these words carries a different meaning. A registration may be “suspended,” for example, if a motorist “fail[s] to maintain in good working order . . . any air pollution control system or mechanism that is used to control air pollution of a vehicle . . . .” I.C. § 13-17-5-3. A motorist operating a vehicle with an “expired” registration, on the other hand, “commits a Class C infraction.” I.C. § 9-18.1-11-2(c). The registration in the instant case was not expired. Corporal Nelson could plainly see this fact from the BMV readout which reflected an expiration date of December 7, 2020, then approximately two months away. See Ex. 1; see also Tr. Vol. II p. 8. The record suggests that Corporal Nelson conflated the status of “inactive” with that of “expired,” and concluded that White was committing a traffic violation.
In fact, a reading of Title 9 of the Indiana Code, which governs motor vehicles, reveals that the word “inactive” does not appear once. This suggests that “inactive” is a registration status contemplated by the BMV, not by the legislature. Indeed, Corporal Nelson’s testimony seems to suggest that he is aware that the word “inactive” is used by the BMV internally for an administrative purpose, and that its meaning in that context may well differ from Corporal Nelson’s understanding of the term.
The State points us to Dowdy v. State, 83 N.E.3d 755, 758 (Ind. Ct. App. 2017). In Dowdy, we ruled that an officer had reasonable suspicion to conduct a traffic stop where the BMV readout mistakenly conveyed that a registration was expired. It is true that Dowdy concerned an officer’s mistake of law that was nevertheless reasonable. We find Dowdy, however, to be inapposite to the case at bar. Corporal Nelson’s error here was not a mistake of law—which is to say a misunderstanding as to the scope of conduct covered by the statute—but a mistake as to whether any law proscribing White’s conduct even exists.
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Here we are not engaged with the question of whether a statute is ambiguous, such that Corporal Nelson’s misunderstanding of the statute could be reasonable. There simply is no statute prohibiting an “inactive” registration.
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The basis upon which the officer’s belief is based must be objective if there is to be a finding of reasonable suspicion. Objectively speaking, driving with an “inactive” registration is not, so far as we can tell, an infraction. Corporal Nelson did not do what a reasonable officer in his situation would do. Rather, he could see that the registration was not expired, and stopped White anyway. We see no explanation in the record for why Corporal Nelson believed that an “inactive” registration was illegal.
The State argues that: Defendant characterizes Officer Nelson’s actions as amounting to a mistake of law about the car’s registration status, but the more accurate view is that whether the registration had inactive or not [sic] is an arguable mistake of fact. Officer Nelson did not decide as a matter of his own legal interpretation that the registration was inactive; rather, he relied upon the BMV’s factual assertion that the status was “inactive” Appellee’s Br. pp. 11-12. This is incorrect. Whether the registration was “inactive”—in fact—does not bear on the question of reasonable suspicion. We may accept as true the fact that the registration was “inactive.” The question before us is whether a reasonable officer would have recognized that an “inactive” registration is not an infraction. That is to say, “inactive” is a registration not salient to the decisions made by the legislature, or the conduct it has chosen to outlaw, but rather to the nomenclature adopted internally by the BMV.
We cannot conclude that—as an objective matter—a reasonable officer would seek to enforce laws that do not exist. “The [Supreme] Court determined that ‘reasonable suspicion can rest on a mistaken understanding of the scope of a legal prohibition.’” Davis, 143 N.E.3d at 349 (quoting Heien, 574 U.S. 60). The Supreme Court has not determined that reasonable suspicion can rest on whether a legal prohibition exists at all. Accordingly, we reverse the trial court’s denial of White’s motion to suppress.
Reversed.
Mathias, J., concurs.
Robb, J., dissents with opinion.
Robb, J., dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
The majority concludes that Corporal Nelson did not have an objectively reasonable belief that White was committing an infraction because his error was not a “misunderstanding as to the scope of conduct covered by the statute . . . but a mistake as to whether any law proscribing White’s conduct even exists.” Slip op. at ¶ 14 (emphasis omitted). But I believe that is, itself, a mistake of law in this case.
The majority notes that prior to United States Supreme Court’s decision in Heien, the law in Indiana was that although a law enforcement officer’s good faith belief that under the facts a person has committed a violation will justify a traffic stop, a mistaken belief as to what constitutes a violation under the law did not amount to good faith. Meredith v. State, 906 N.E.2d 867, 870 (ind. 2009). Following the decision in Heien that the Fourth Amendment allows for reasonable mistakes of fact and law, 574 U.S. at 60-61, Indiana too adopted that position, see Williams, 28 N.E.3d at 294.
Thus, “[a]n officer’s decision to stop a vehicle is valid so long as his on-the-spot evaluation reasonably suggests that lawbreaking occurred.” Miller v. State, 188 N.E.3d 871, 875 (Ind. 2022) (quoting Meredith v. State, 906 N.E.2d 867, 870 (Ind. 2009)). An objectively reasonable mistake of law or fact does not make a stop unlawful. Id. (citing Heien, 574 U.S. at 66).
Corporal Nelson’s “on-the-spot” evaluation was that the “inactive” designation on White’s registration meant that the plate was “not currently active on that vehicle[,]” Tr., Vol. 2 at 10, and he believed that was a designation worth investigating. Although Indiana Code section 9-18.1-11-2(c) makes it a Class C infraction to operate a vehicle with an expired registration, see slip op. at ¶ 12, section 9-18.1-2-11 – in the chapter under which White was charged – states that “[a] person that fails to register a vehicle that is required to be registered under this chapter commits a Class C infraction” and makes no reference to whether or not a registration is “expired.” Under these circumstances, I do not believe Corporal Nelson necessarily conflated the terms “inactive” and “expired” or necessarily relied on Indiana Code section 9-18.1-11-2(c) as a basis for the stop. Considering the totality of the circumstances, I would hold it was objectively reasonable for Corporal Nelson to believe that any return other than “active” indicated that something could be amiss with White’s registration and therefore he had reasonable suspicion to stop White’s vehicle.
I would affirm the trial court’s denial of White’s motion to suppress.