Texas – Advanced Traffic Stops

Every traffic stop you make is a Fourth Amendment event. The stop is a seizure. The frisk is a search. The consent, the sniff, the sweep, the inventory, the tow — every one of them has to be defended later, in writing, by you.

Texas Advanced Traffic Stops is a twelve-module online course that takes you through the constitutional law of the traffic stop from the ground up, in the order you actually encounter it on the road. It is taught by John Wien, an attorney since 2011 and a former Arizona patrol sergeant, SWAT operator, field training officer, and certified force science analyst — someone who has written the report and testified to it, not just read the opinion.

The course is built on a single framework: the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit all searches and seizures, only unreasonable ones. So the job is to convince a court that what you did was reasonable, and there are only three ways to do it — consent, a recognized exception, or a warrant. Every module in this course is an answer to one of those three.

From there you will work through the two tests that define when a search has even occurred (Katz and Jones), what pretext gets you and what it does not (Whren), how long you may lawfully keep someone (Rodriguez), and the four techniques for running a productive investigation without prolonging the stop. You will work consent from all three of its requirements — including the Texas Constitution’s higher clear-and-convincing burden. You will get protective sweeps under Michigan v. Long, search incident to arrest after Arizona v. Gant, inventory before courts take it away from us, K9 timing and the Jones problem with handler-directed touches, and the full Carroll doctrine broken into four factors.

Throughout, the emphasis is on Texas: Article 1, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution, where Texas tracks the federal standard and where it deviates, Fifth Circuit authority, and Texas cases like Jordan v. State and United States v. Richmond. Nearly every module is anchored to real dash cam and body camera footage that is stopped, debriefed, and picked apart the way a defense attorney will pick apart yours.