State of Minnesota, Respondent,

This opinion is nonprecedential except as provided by
Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A22-1538

State of Minnesota,
Respondent,

vs.

Michael James Swanson,
Appellant.

Filed September 11, 2023
Affirmed
Ross, Judge

Sibley County District Court
File No. 72-CR-21-178

Keith Ellison, Attorney General, St. Paul, Minnesota; and

Kenneth G. Janssen, Gaylord City Attorney, Gavin, Janssen & Stabenow, Ltd., Glencoe,
Minnesota (for respondent)

Cathryn Middlebrook, Chief Appellate Public Defender, John Donovan, Assistant Public
Defender, St. Paul, Minnesota (for appellant)

Considered and decided by Worke, Presiding Judge; Ross, Judge; and Cleary,
Judge.
∗

∗ Retired judge of the Minnesota Court of Appeals, serving by appointment pursuant to
Minn. Const. art. VI, § 10.
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NONPRECEDENTIAL OPINION
ROSS, Judge
A police officer stopped behind Michael Swanson’s parked car after learning from
convenience-store employees that Swanson had just been in the store loudly making
aggressive and vulgar comments to one of the employees before driving away drunk. The
officer asked Swanson to submit to field sobriety testing, and Swanson refused. The officer
arrested Swanson and searched the car, discovering a half-empty bottle of liquor near the
driver’s seat. The state charged Swanson with driving while intoxicated and with
unlawfully possessing an open container of alcohol. Swanson unsuccessfully moved to
suppress evidence obtained from the stop, arguing that the officer lacked reasonable
suspicion to stop him. Because we hold that a reasonable officer would have suspected that
Swanson was driving while intoxicated, we affirm.
FACTS
Gaylord police officer James Volk and Sibley County sheriff’s deputy Anthony
Daily responded in July 2021 to Casey’s General Store to a report that a man was harassing
one of the store’s employees. Officer Volk spoke with the store’s manager and a cashier at
about 10:00 p.m. The manager told the officers that the man entered the store “drunk all
the frickin time” and “rais[ing] heck” with the employees while frequently targeting a
particular cashier. The manager explained that the man so frightened the cashier that she
would retreat to the kitchen whenever the man entered. The manager and cashier told the
officers that the man had come into the store twice that evening. The manager said that the
man told the cashier that he “wanted to bend her over and f--k the s --t out of her in the
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store.” The cashier told the officers that, after she told the man to leave, “he started raising
his voice, not really making much sense [because] like I said he is drunk and so he’s just
slurring his words . . . and saying ‘f--k you, you’re a bitch.’” She repeated her concern
about his condition, reporting that “tonight he’s just . . . drunk and he’s driving.”
The cashier told the officers that the man was yelling and that the manager told him
to leave the store because he was “disrupting [the] peace.” They showed the officers a
photo of the man’s identification card, which he had left in the store on a previous
encounter, and they informed them of the man’s personalized license plate number. The
identification belonged to appellant Michael Swanson, and the plate was registered to a
black Mercedes-Benz. The cashier told the officers the direction Swanson was driving:
Cashier: I believe he went that way.
Daily: Kay.
Cashier: He is also very much so intoxicated right now and
driving.
. . . .
Daily: Just wanted to kinda get the gist of what made you think
that he was intoxicated but when I was coming up here it
sounds like he was slurring . . . .
Volk: Yup.
Cashier: Yeah, and he’s just very . . . .
Daily: Stumbling?
Cashier: Yeah, stumbling; very loud.

The officers left to locate Swanson. Officer Volk found the black Mercedes-Benz
parked in an alley one-half of a mile from the store. The officer stopped behind the
Mercedes and activated his squad car’s emergency lights. Swanson exited the car angry,
yelling, and walking toward the officer. Officer Volk noticed that Swanson was stumbling
and slurring his speech. He smelled the odor of an alcoholic beverage on Swanson. Officer
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Volk asked Swanson to submit to field sobriety testing, but Swanson refused. He arrested
Swanson and then searched his car, where he found a half-empty bottle of Cognac.
The state charged Swanson with second-degree driving while intoxicated based on
his chemical-test refusal and unlawful possession of an open bottle of alcohol in a motor
vehicle. Swanson moved to suppress all evidence obtained from the stop, arguing that the
officer lacked reasonable suspicion to stop the car or ask Swanson to undergo sobriety
testing. The district court held a contested omnibus hearing, where Swanson and the state
stipulated to the admissibility of the audio recording of the Casey’s employees reporting
their encounter with Swanson to Officer Volk and Deputy Daily. The district court also
heard testimony from Officer Volk. It then denied Swanson’s motion to suppress, holding
among other things that Officer Volk had reasonable suspicion to stop Swanson based on
the report that Swanson had been harassing and threatening the cashier. The district court
did not discuss the employees’ report of Swanson’s drunk driving.
The state dismissed the open-bottle charge, and the case proceeded to a bench trial.
The district court found Swanson guilty of second-degree driving while intoxicated. The
district court convicted Swanson and sentenced him to two years of supervised probation.
Swanson appeals.
DECISION
Swanson appeals his conviction, arguing only that the district court erroneously held
that the stop of his car was constitutionally valid. The argument fails.
Although Swanson bases his appeal only on the district court’s express basis for its
decision that the officer had reasonable suspicion to stop his car—harassment and threats—
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we do not so limit our consideration. We review the district court’s factual findings
underlying its decision on a motion to suppress for clear error, but we review the district
court’s legal conclusions de novo. State v. Gauster, 752 N.W.2d 496, 502 (Minn. 2008).
We reject Swanson’s attempt to limit our review. We observe at the outset, however, based
on acknowledgements made by counsel during the parties’ oral argument in this appeal,
that the issue of reasonable suspicion would not likely have been a subject of appeal if the
prosecutor had more clearly presented, and the district court and the parties had directly
addressed, the most apparent basis for reasonable suspicion —impaired driving—during
the omnibus hearing.
At the heart of our review is a person’s constitutional right to be free of certain
government intrusion s. The United States and Minnesota Constitutions prohibit
unreasonable searches and seizures, and warrantless searches or seizures are presumed
unreasonable. U.S. Const. amend. IV; Minn. Const. art. I, § 10. But an officer may, without
a warrant, perform an investigatory stop of a vehicle if he has a reasonable, articulable
suspicion of criminal activity. State v. Pike, 551 N.W.2d 919, 921–22 (Minn. 1996) (citing
Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21–22 (1968)). Swanson’s contention that we are limited to the
district court’s rationale and fact findings miscomprehend the nature of the constitutional
right. The Fourth Amendment prohibits officers from effecting
“unreasonable . . . seizures.” U.S. Const. amend. IV. And “the Fourth Amendment’s
concern with ‘reasonableness’ allows certain actions to be taken in certain circumstances,
whatever the subjective intent.” Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 814 (1996). For this
reason, “[s]ubjective intentions play no role in ordinary, probable-cause Fourth
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Amendment analysis,” id. at 813, and the same is so in ordinary, reasonable-suspicion
analysis, United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112, 122 (2001). We apply this objective
standard here.
For that reason, we do not limit our review to the explanation the officer articulated
as the basis for the stop. As the United States Supreme Court explained, “the constitutional
reasonableness of traffic stops” cannot turn on “the actual motivations of the individual
officers involved.” Whren, 517 U.S. at 813; see also Knights, 534 U.S. at 122 (extending
Whren’s objective test to reasonable suspicion review). Although appellate courts
frequently consider the actually articulated rationale that the seizing officer relied on for
the stop, see, e.g., State v. Diede, 795 N.W.2d 836, 843 (Minn. 2011), the more accurately
described objective test is “whether a reasonable, articulable suspicion exists from the
perspective of a trained police officer.” State v. Lemert, 843 N.W.2d 227, 230 (Minn. 2014)
(emphasis added). For that reason, “[i]t is enough that a law enforcement officer can
articulate specific facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts,
objectively support the officer’s suspicion.” State v. Lugo, 887 N.W.2d 476, 486 (Minn.
2016) (emphasis added). We are not restricted to the officer’s stated rationale in our review.
And because our review of the district court’s decision is de novo, in addition to
being based on objective analysis, we do not limit our review to the reason the district court
relied on when it determined the stop’s validity. We demonstrated this approach in State v.
Poehler, 921 N.W.2d 577 (Minn. App. 2018), aff’d, 935 N.W.2d 729 (Minn. 2019). In
Poehler, we recognized that the district court deemed a traffic stop constitutional on an
invalid ground. 921 N.W.2d at 582. But based on the de novo nature of our review and the
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objective framing of our analysis, we explained, “Although Officer Giese lacked
reasonable suspicion to stop Poehler for having a vision-impairing cracked windshield, and
the district court mistakenly validated the stop on that ground, the officer nevertheless had
reasonable suspicion to stop him for not wearing his seat belt.” Id. We are not restricted to
the district court’s stated rationale in our review.
The district court received as evidence in the omnibus hearing the audio recording
of the Casey’s employees’ report to the officers and the transcript of the discussion. The
parties stipulated to the admissibility of th is evidence at that hearing, and it was admitted
without redaction. The recording is an undisputed fact establishing what the officers were
told. And based on the content of the recording and the circumstances related to it, we are
confident that a trained police officer would reasonably suspect that Swanson had engaged
in driving while impaired. An informant’s tip with sufficient “indicia of reliability” will
justify a traffic stop. Olson v. Comm’r of Pub. Safety, 371 N.W.2d 552, 556 (Minn. 1985).
The supreme court has held that reasonable suspicion of drunk driving existed on far less
compelling facts than we have here. City of Minnetonka v. Shepherd, 420 N.W.2d 887,
888, 891 (Minn. 1988). In Shepherd, the court held that police had “sufficient information
to reasonably suspect that the driver of the car in question was intoxicated” after a gas -
station attendant called police near midnight and reported “that he had observed an
intoxicated driver leave the gas station heading north on Williston Road in a white Honda
with Minnesota license plate No. NKD 098.” Id. (emphasis omitted). Here police learned
much more. They were told that Swanson frequently entered the store drunk and that he
was drunk that night, that he had slurred speech, that he was loud, that he was belligerent,
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and that he was vulgar and confrontational. Officer Volk then found the car the witnesses
said Swanson was driving stopped in an alley within minutes of the report. We hold that
these circumstances afforded the officer reasonable suspicion to seize Swanson and
investigate whether Swanson had been driving drunk. We therefore need not consid er
Swanson’s contention that his conduct in the store falls short of criminal harassment,
criminal threats, or disorderly conduct.
We are not persuaded to a different conclusion by Swanson’s argument that, because
the state relied only on a theory of reasonable suspicion of disorderly conduct during the
omnibus hearing in the district court, it cannot rely on reasonable suspicion of driving while
intoxicated when urging us to affirm the district court’s decision denying Swanson’s
motion to suppress. An appellate court may affirm a district court’s order on alternat ive
grounds when “there are sufficient facts in the record for the appellate court to consider the
alternative theories, there is legal support for the arguments, and the alternative grounds
would not expand the relief previously granted.” State v. Grunig, 660 N.W.2d 134, 137
(Minn. 2003); see also Minn. R. Crim. P. 29.04, subd. 6 (“The court may permit a party,
without filing a cross-petition, to defend a decision or judgment on any ground that the law
and record permit that would not expand the relief that has been granted to the party.”) The
law and the record support our holding that reasonable suspicion of impaired driving
existed before the stop. And affirming on that ground would not expand the relief granted.
We reject Swanson’s effort to foreclose the impaired-driving rationale for the stop.
Affirmed.