A new case in Kansas, State v. Ross, addresses a situation seen very frequently in Kansas DUI cases. Generally, all a police officer needs is a simple traffic infraction in order to pull a driver over. Late at night, officers will look for any little violation that they can find to justify a stop so that they can also smell the driver and see if they can get a DUI. I see a lot of people who were stopped for things they would never get pulled over for during the day, like not having a light above their license plate, not using a turn signal and, very often, “Failure to Maintain a Single Lane”.
There really is no such thing as “Failure to Maintain a Single Lane”. The statute, KSA 8-1522, is actually called “Driving on Roadways Laned for Traffic”. Anyway, it is often cited as FTMSL. An officer will pull a driver over (especially anytime after midnight) if the driver’s tires cross a lane divider or the edge line. Police officers would sometimes pull their cruisers right up onto the tail of a driver they wanted to stop an tailgate them, even swerving back and forth a little. This induces what is known as “Black and White Fever”, wherein the driver, nervous becuase there is a police officer right on his or her tail, spends more time looking in the rearview mirror at what is going on than looking at the road before him or her. Naturally, they will leave their lane briefly during this time. Often at trial, I can establish that the driver’s tire crossed the line only by an inch or two, or even a tire width, and only for a second. However, this was previously considered FTMSL, and was all that was necessary for a stop.
The Ross case says that the statute does not require that a driver never leave his or her lane. The law only requires that a driver maintain his or her lane as “nearly as practicable” and only leave the lane if it can be done safely. I have argued this exact point numerous times before, including to the same Court of Appeals that handed down the Ross case, but to little avail. Fortunately, they have now recognized the plain language of the law, and the common sense reality that it is not necessary that a vehicle rigidly stay in the lane, as long as any brief movement out of the lane is not unsafe. As the Court recognizes, cars do not run on rails.
I would be willing to bet that, all of a sudden, there will not be any more car stops for FTMSL in Kansas DUI cases and we will see an upsurge in other justifications for making a stop. These stops were almost always a pretext for a Kansas DUI investigation anyway and sometimes were brought on by the deliberate tailgating of the officer. Thanks to this new case, they’ll have to come up with something else now in order to justify pulling someone over.