State of Kansas, Appellant, v. Brian G. Beck, Appellee. (2026)

MEMORANDUM OPINION

This is the State's interlocutory appeal challenging the Geary County District Court's order suppressing nearly a kilogram of methamphetamine Deputy Sheriff Bradley Rose discovered after making a traffic stop of Defendant Brian G. Beck's car. The district court explicitly concluded the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule did not apply and implicitly found the initial stop amounted to an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, thereby violating Beck's rights. The district court erred. At the time of the stop, a law enforcement officer in Rose's position reasonably would have believed Beck violated K.S.A. 8-133 by obscuring the state name on his Illinois license plate with a decorative frame. The ostensible violation gave Rose reasonable suspicion to stop Beck.

By way of quick legal background, if governmental agents carry out a search or seizure violating a person's Fourth Amendment rights, the courts typically will apply the exclusionary rule to bar the government from using any seized contraband or other evidence in a criminal prosecution of that person. United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 908-09, 104 S. Ct. 3405, 82 L. Ed. 2d 677 (1984) (describing operation of exclusionary rule); State v. Althaus, 49 Kan. App. 2d 210, 219, 305 P.3d 716 (2013). But the courts have also recognized a “good-faith” exception to the exclusionary rule when governmental agents have, for example, conducted a search or seizure based on an objectively reasonable error resulting from someone else's discrete negligence or have acted in reliance on what appears to be a facially sufficient search warrant. The good-faith exception permits the government to use the evidence, notwithstanding a Fourth Amendment violation. Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135, 142-43, 129 S. Ct. 695, 172 L. Ed. 2d 496 (2009) (cataloguing cases applying good-faith exception to avert suppression of evidence); Leon, 468 U.S. at 913-14, 920-21 (recognizing good-faith exception for facially valid search warrant).

In an earlier appeal in this case, the Kansas Supreme Court held that K.S.A. 8-133 actually allows a driver to cover up the name of a state on a license plate. State v. Beck, 321 Kan. 261, 270, 577 P.3d 119 (2025) (Beck I). To arrive at that conclusion, the court undertook an intricate analysis of several statutes, including K.S.A. 8-133, and effectively overruled a longstanding Court of Appeals opinion. The court remanded this case to the district court for an additional hearing to explore the reasonableness of Rose's traffic stop and the possible application of an exception to the exclusionary rule. 321 Kan. at 270. This appeal follows the district court's hearing on remand. Consistent with Heien v. North Carolina, 574 U.S. 54, 60-61, 135 S. Ct. 530, 190 L. Ed. 2d 475 (2014), we conclude Rose made an objectively reasonable mistake of law and, therefore, did not violate the Fourth Amendment.

We reverse the district court's order granting the motion to suppress and remand with directions to deny the motion and to otherwise proceed with this case.

Factual and Procedural History

On appeal, the sole issue is the constitutional reasonableness of Rose's initial stop of Beck's car—a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. We, therefore, do not address the constitutional sufficiency of the search that followed the seizure and directly yielded the methamphetamine.

In March 2021, Rose was patrolling in a marked sheriff's vehicle on Interstate 70 when he saw Beck's sedan. A decorative frame surrounded the rear license plate on the sedan and covered the upper half of the state name “Illinois” at the top of the plate. Rose concluded the frame and plate violated K.S.A. 8-133(c), requiring that “[e]very license plate ․ shall be fastened in a place and position to be clearly visible ․ and in a condition to be clearly legible.” He testified that the frame made the state name very difficult to read and kept him from readily identifying Illinois as the issuing state. Violation of K.S.A. 8-133 is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 and thus an arrestable offense. See K.S.A. 8-149 (penalties for violation of K.S.A. 8-133 and other general traffic infractions related to registration and licensing of motor vehicles).

Irrelevant to this appeal, the traffic stop evolved into a drug interdiction and the seizure of about 965 grams of methamphetamine from Beck's car. The State charged Beck with possession of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute, a severity level 1 nonperson drug felony, and two other lesser felonies. Beck filed a motion to suppress the evidence on the grounds Rose lacked a reasonable suspicion to initiate the stop. Rose was the only witness to testify at the suppression hearing. He explained that Beck's rear license plate was “obstructed” because the frame effectively made the issuing state's name on the plate unreadable. Rose considered that to be a violation of K.S.A. 8-133. The district court denied Beck's motion to suppress.

Beck went to trial in February 2023, and the jury found him guilty on all three charges. The district court later imposed a controlling 146-month prison sentence. Beck appealed, and we affirmed in an unpublished opinion. State v. Beck, No. 126,350, 2024 WL 1827298, at *13 (Kan. App. 2024) (unpublished opinion). The Kansas Supreme Court granted Beck's petition for review to consider the legal sufficiency of the traffic stop.

In Beck I, the court endeavored to determine if covering the state name on a license plate violates the requirements in K.S.A. 8-133(c) that the plate be visible and legible. The court examined K.S.A. 8-147 that requires Kansas license plates to display “easily read” alphanumeric identifiers. That statute makes no mention of a state name. 321 Kan. at 268. The court, in turn, considered K.S.A. 8-132 that governs the annual decals affixed to Kansas license plates. The decal is to include the vehicle registration number, the covered year, and the state name, which may be abbreviated. The court also mentioned K.S.A. 8-1,141, regulating personalized license plates. The court concluded that none of those statutes require a license plate to display a state name—the name need appear only on the registration decal. The court found no other statutory or regulatory provision imposing such a requirement. 321 Kan. at 268-69. From that synthesis, the court reasoned that because a state name is not required on a license plate in Kansas, a driver cannot violate K.S.A. 8-133(c) by covering up or otherwise rendering a state name that does appear on a license plate unreadable. In turn, an obscured state name would not furnish reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop. And the court concluded that would be true even if Illinois requires its name to appear as an identifier on the license plates it issues. 321 Kan. at 269. As we have suggested, the analysis in Beck I may be fairly characterized as involved, if not complicated, and the conclusion does not ineluctably follow from a reading of K.S.A. 8-133 alone.

In Beck I, the court acknowledged that our decision in State v. Hayes, 8 Kan. App. 2d 531, 660 P.2d 1387 (1983), came to the opposite conclusion. In Hayes, the court focused on K.S.A. 8-133 and found that a driver with an Indiana license plate violated the statute because the state name was not readable. The court reasoned that the name, especially on an out-of-state plate, provided important identifying information for law enforcement officers. 8 Kan. App. 2d at 533. While Beck I dismissed Hayes as “rest[ing] on a shaky foundation,” the decision remained good law for more than 40 years. 321 Kan. at 266.

Based on its new reading of K.S.A. 8-133(c), the Beck I court reversed the district court's ruling denying the motion to suppress, reversed Beck's convictions, and remanded to the district court to hold a hearing to determine if Rose “had constitutionally valid grounds for making the stop and seizure, and if not, whether an exception to the exclusionary rule applies.” 321 Kan. at 270.

At the hearing on remand, Rose testified that at the time he stopped Beck, he believed the wording of K.S.A. 8-133(c) prohibited driving a motor vehicle with a license plate that obscured the issuing state's name. He also testified that he was familiar with the Hayes decision to that effect. The district court granted Beck's motion to suppress the evidence. The State has appealed.

Legal Analysis

The State may bring an interlocutory appeal of a district court's ruling suppressing evidence. K.S.A. 22-3603. On appeal, the State must establish that the loss of the suppressed evidence would “seriously impede” a successful prosecution of the case. State v. Huninghake, 238 Kan. 155, 157, 708 P.2d 529 (1985). Not to belabor the obvious, the suppression of the methamphetamine seized from Beck's car would undermine the case against him for possession of the drug with the intent to distribute.

In response to Beck's motion to suppress in the district court, the State bore the burden of proving the lawfulness of the traffic stop by a preponderance of the evidence. See State v. Patterson, 304 Kan. 272, 274, 371 P.3d 893 (2016). When reviewing a district court's ruling on a motion to suppress, we apply the well-known bifurcated standard calling on us to determine if substantial evidence supports the district court's factual findings. And if so, we then independently decide whether those facts justify the district court's legal conclusion. State v. Yeargin-Charles, 321 Kan. 271, 274, 577 P.3d 542 (2025). We see no disputed factual issues here, so the question before us—the constitutional sufficiency of the traffic stop—presents a question of law. See Patterson, 304 Kan. at 274.

We briefly outline familiar legal principles applicable to the sufficiency of traffic stops. First, the Fourth Amendment precludes government agents from making unreasonable seizures or searches of persons and their possessions. U.S. Const. amend. IV. A traffic stop is a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. A law enforcement officer must have a reasonable suspicion the driver has committed, is committing, or is about to commit an illegal act to make a stop. Heien, 574 U.S. at 60; Yeargin-Charles, 321 Kan. 271, Syl. ¶ 2. A reasonable suspicion requires an objective determination based on articulable facts rather than mere hunches or guesses, but it is something less than probable cause. Yeargin-Charles, 321 Kan. 271, Syl. ¶¶ 3-4; see Heien, 574 U.S. at 60 (reasonable suspicion entails “ ‘a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped’ of breaking the law”). Ultimately, we assess the totality of the circumstances and ask whether an objectively reasonable law enforcement officer would have had a reasonable suspicion. The subjective belief of the officer making the stop is irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment calculus. State v. Cash, 313 Kan. 121, 132-34, 483 P.3d 1047 (2021); State v. Beltran, 48 Kan. App. 2d 857, 882, 300 P.3d 92 (2013).

The controlling issue here turns on the treatment of Rose's mistaken understanding that K.S.A. 8-133(c) provided reasonable suspicion for him to stop Beck's car and whether the stop thus conformed to the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. In Heien, the Court addressed this precise question and held that a law enforcement officer's objectively reasonable reliance on a statute to initiate a traffic stop did not violate the Fourth Amendment even though the state's highest court later treated the officer's reading of the statute as mistaken. 574 U.S. at 66-68. The Court held that a “reasonable suspicion can rest on a mistaken understanding of the scope of a legal prohibition.” 574 U.S. at 60. But a mistaken understanding of the law must itself be objectively reasonable. 574 U.S. at 66. The Kansas Supreme Court has recognized the Heien rule. See City of Atwood v. Pianalto, 301 Kan. 1008, 1013, 350 P.3d 1048 (2015) (“[I]n Heien, the United States Supreme Court ․ held that reasonable suspicion could also arise based on an officer's reasonable mistake of law.”).

In his appellate brief, Beck suggests the State never raised Heien in the district court, so we should disregard its reliance on that authority now. But Beck is mistaken. The State cited and quoted at length from Heien in a response to the motion to suppress it filed after the case had been remanded.

What remains for us, given the rule in Heien, is to determine if an objectively reasonable reading of K.S.A. 8-133(c) would have furnished reasonable suspicion to stop Beck's car in 2021 when Rose did so. This presents a straightforward question of law.

Nothing in the language of K.S.A. 8-133(c) or the balance of that statute directly states or even obliquely suggests a driver can cover up the state name appearing on a license plate. Rather, standing alone, K.S.A. 8-133(c) at the very least implies that the entirety of a license plate must be “visible” and “legible,” including the state name. We find that would have been a perfectly reasonable reading of K.S.A. 8-133 before Beck I. See Unruh v. Purina Mills, 289 Kan. 1185, 1194, 221 P.3d 1130 (2009) (statute should not be construed to add something not readily found in wording or to delete something embraced in wording). This court's opinion in Hayes bolsters that reading of K.S.A. 8-133(c) as being plausible.

In Beck I, the court rendered another plausible construction of the statute. As we have described, the court did so with an elaborate analysis cutting across multiple statutes governing license plates and registration decals. And its conclusion does not rest on plain wording found in K.S.A. 8-133. All of which is to say that some statutes may be open to two plausible readings. That doesn't make one or the other reading unreasonable. In short, Rose had at hand an objectively reasonable, though ultimately mistaken, reading of K.S.A. 8-133(c) that furnished reasonable suspicion to stop Beck's car. And that reading conformed to Hayes, a published opinion of this court that we presume would have been known to a reasonable law enforcement officer, especially given its longevity. Rose's mistake of law did not render the traffic stop unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Because Rose did not violate the Fourth Amendment, the district court erred in granting Beck's motion to suppress and applying the exclusionary rule to bar the methamphetamine seized from Beck's car as evidence. We, in turn, have no need to address the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule as an alternative basis for allowing the State to use the methamphetamine as evidence.

We reverse the district court's order and remand with directions to deny the motion to suppress and to proceed with the prosecution of Beck in conformity with the court's decision in Beck I and our ruling today.

Reversed and remanded with directions.

Per Curiam: