Ineffective assistance of counsel; Failure to renew a motion to suppress evidence; Search & seizure; Traffic stop; Reasonable & articulable suspicion; People v Mazzie; Effect of a canine alert on a vehicle; Probable cause; People v Clark; Post-Michigan Regulation & Taxation of Marihuana Act (MARTA) effect of the smell of marijuana; People v Armstrong; Effect of officers’ subjective intentions; Prosecutorial error; Motion to consolidate cases into one trial; MCR 6.120(B)(1) & (2); Confidential informant (CI)

The court held that defendant’s trial counsel was not ineffective for failing to renew a motion to suppress because such a motion would have failed given that no Fourth Amendment violation occurred. It also rejected his prosecutorial error claim, noting that “the prosecution was legally permitted to move to join the cases into one trial” and concluding that the trial court did not plainly err in granting that motion. Defendant was convicted of meth possession in one of the cases on appeal and of obstruction of justice in both cases. The court held that a renewed motion to suppress lacked merit because the traffic stops were “supported by reasonable and articulable suspicion, and probable cause existed, based on the totality of the circumstances, to search the vehicle for narcotics.” Before conducting the stops, “officers verified that the vehicle was uninsured and unregistered by running its license plate through LEIN. Information obtained from LEIN can provide officers with reasonable and articulable suspicion to suspect that a traffic violation has occurred.” Given that “driving an unregistered and uninsured vehicle are both traffic offenses, reasonable and articulable suspicion existed to support both traffic stops, which led to defendant being lawfully seized. After [he] was lawfully seized, the vehicle was lawfully searched following the” second traffic stop, which resulted in meth being found. The “police canine performed an exterior open-air sniff of the vehicle and alerted on [its] front passenger door. The officers searched the vehicle’s interior and discovered meth[] and drug paraphernalia in a jacket that had defendant’s identification in it, located near where [he] was seated. The officer’s search of the vehicle was lawful under the Fourth Amendment because it is well established that canine sniffs of the exterior of a vehicle are reasonable and not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment.” As to his argument based on the fact the canine “was trained to alert for marijuana,” the court held that “there was probable cause in this particular case because it was not the canine sniff alone that led to the search.” A deputy witnessed a controlled buy of narcotics between a CI and the vehicle’s driver (C) involving the vehicle, after the deputy “received information from a ‘credible and reliable [CI]’ indicating that [C] was procuring large amounts of” meth. Affirmed.