On the evening of May 10, a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy typed a California license plate into two plate-reader databases, and the software asked him to give a reason. The reasons on record are “traffic violation” and “investigation.” According to the federal judge who later reviewed the stop, the only thing the deputy knew about the car at that moment was the state on its plate.
On Oct. 1, U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma ruled that the lookup was a search under the Fourth Amendment, that it was done without a warrant, and that the evidence it led to cannot be used. The case is United States v. Melisa Susan Kyle, No. 26-CR-00189-SEH. Three other federal judges in Oklahoma, one of them in the same district, had reached the opposite result over the previous 14 months…