* * *
The district court correctly denied Magallon-Lopez’s motion to suppress. The judgment is AFFIRMED.
BERZON, Circuit Judge, concurring:
Is it fine for police officers flatly to tell the drivers they stop that they observed—or thought they observed—a traffic violation when they really did not? We hold today that it is. And I cannot disagree, as the line of cases that begins with Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996), seems to lead ineluctably to that distressing conclusion. But lying to government officials can lead to lengthy prison terms. See U.S.S.G. § 2J1.3(a) (providing a base offense level of fourteen for perjury-type offenses, which, at criminal history category I, results in a recommended sentence of fifteen to twenty-one months). One would expect that lying by police officers to citizens would have consequences as well.
Whren and the other cases the majority cites do not deal directly with flat out lies about what police officers saw. Instead, Whren dealt with pretextual stops—that is, instances in which the officers did perceive actions that violated the traffic laws, but were really using the traffic violations as a basis for investigating some other crime. Perhaps there was no reasonable suspicion as to the real reason for the stop, just a hunch. Or perhaps the officers did not want to reveal the real reason for the stop, as the underlying criminal investigation was still ongoing. United States v. Evans noted that law enforcement terms this type of stop a “wall stop”—that is, “the traffic stop [i]s to be independent and
