Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Randy Riches and drug-sniffing dog "Terro" conduct a training exercise. A man who has been in prison since pleading guilty in 2020 to trafficking drugs through Utah could now be released after an appeals court decided Wednesday that he was convicted using illegally gathered evidence, which was garnered during a traffic stop and subsequent K-9 search.
backseat, then a can of spray deodorizer in the center console. The trooper also said Frazier didn’t completely roll down his window down as they spoke and paused before answering questions, as if to “come up with the right answer but not necessarily the simple, correct answer.” “Our deference to law enforcement judgment extends to reasonable inferences drawn from specific, articulable facts,” Seymour wrote in the ruling, “not inchoate suspicions and unparticularized hunches.”At 9:11 a.m. on the day of the traffic stop, five minutes after Frazier was pulled over, the trooper got into his patrol car, according to the ruling. But Gibbs didn’t immediately begin writing a citation.
Federal prosecutors indicted Frazier in 2019 with distributing fentanyl and cocaine and possessing a gun. He pleaded guilty to the charges in September 2020 and was sentenced to 180 months, or 15 years, in prison. He’s been incarcerated at a federal prison in Texas.the decision to allow evidence from the traffic stop.