Opinion
Court of Appeals No. A-12480 No. 6691
08-22-2018
JODY B. LYON, Appellant, v. STATE OF ALASKA, Appellee.
Appearances: Jane B. Martinez, Anchorage, under contract with the Office of Public Advocacy, for the Appellant. Michal Stryszak, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Criminal Appeals, Anchorage, and Jahna Lindemuth, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee.
NOTICE Memorandum decisions of this Court do not create legal precedent. See Alaska Appellate Rule 214(d) and Paragraph 7 of the Guidelines for Publication of Court of Appeals Decisions (Court of Appeals Order No. 3). Accordingly, this memorandum decision may not be cited as binding authority for any proposition of law. Trial Court No. 3PA-14-055 CR
MEMORANDUM OPINION
Appeal from the Superior Court, Third Judicial District, Palmer, Vanessa H. White, Judge. Appearances: Jane B. Martinez, Anchorage, under contract with the Office of Public Advocacy, for the Appellant. Michal Stryszak, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Criminal Appeals, Anchorage, and Jahna Lindemuth, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee. Before: Mannheimer, Chief Judge, and Allard, Judge. PER CURIAM.
Jody B. Lyon appeals his convictions for felony driving under the influence and driving when his license was revoked. The evidence against Lyon arose from a traffic stop. Lyon asserts that this traffic stop was not justified by the facts known to the state trooper, and that the trooper in fact conducted the stop solely as a pretext to look for evidence of a crime. Thus, Lyon contends, all of the evidence flowing from that traffic stop should be suppressed.
Lyon's suppression argument rests on viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to him, and on discounting the contrary testimony offered by the state trooper who conducted the traffic stop. But after the superior court heard the trooper's account of the stop, the court expressly found that the trooper's account was credible, and that Lyon was justifiably stopped for exceeding the speed limit and for rolling through a stop sign.
When we review the superior court's ruling on Lyon's suppression motion, we must view the evidence in the light most favorable to upholding the court's ruling, and we must uphold the superior court's findings of fact unless those findings are clearly erroneous. Here, the superior court's findings are supported by the record. And given those findings, the court properly denied Lyon's suppression motion.
Accordingly, the judgement of the superior court is AFFIRMED.
Wilburn v. State, 816 P.2d 907, 911 (Alaska App. 1991).