Trooper stops vehicle for failure to signal when entering highway. (Vehicle merged into traffic). Defendant cites to State v. Ballman, 157 S.W.3d 65 (Fort Worth, 2004), drive not required to signal entering highway from private lot.

As vehicle is pulling off road, trooper notes temporary paper tag has expired.

Question: Can the state rely on the second PC? Any caselaw would be welcome.

Would the trooper have noticed the expired temporary tag regardless of whether he had been pulling the car over? If so, then you probably have a good argument to go forward on an independent basis for the stop. If not, then I would suspect that it's like any other evidence that is found after a bad stop/search (e.g., odor of marijuana gives PC to search a car, but if the initial stop is bad, you never get to the odor; the secondary offense is discovered as a result of the first, which then taints the whole investigation).

And this isn't to say that your defense attorney is right. I'd have to research the law on your specific facts to know whether the original stop was no good to begin with.

You could make the argument that pretext arguments (subjective intent) does not matter, and even though the officer's intent was to pull him over for the signal issue, he could validly have pulled him over for the tag. A pretext case is Crittenden v. State, 899 SW2d 668. If subjective intent is irrelevant in a pretext context, you could argue it should be irrelevant in yours--in fact the officer thought he was doing the right thing, and because of the tag, he actually was.

Yeah, but, like Gretchen says, that only works if the expired tag was visible before the car was pulled over (or whether an officer "would have" seen it). Otherwise (assuming the situation is like Ballman), the officer wouldn't be able to justify pulling over the car and then putting himself in a position where he can see the actual violation. Saying he "thought he was doing the right thing" sounds a lot like "good faith" which wouldn't quite work in this context.

This case provides a very good answer to your question. To read it, click here.

Yes it does. thanx