Vehicle Impounded from My Private Driveway

My question involves a traffic citation from the state of:Ohio I was pulled over for failure to use a turn signal while making a turn. Long story short when they made the stop I was pulling into my private driveway. The officer told me I had the wrong tags on my vehicle and he was going to have it impounded. So he gave me a ticket for not signaling and fictitious registration. He then proceeded to search my car and called for a tow truck. Minutes later my car was gone and everything in it had been gone through. Question, is it lawfull for an official to search and impound a vehicle right out of your own yard?

There is no "home free". You violated the law while on a public roadway. You aren't safe just because you pulled onto private property

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Quoting MrDurham

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Question, is it lawfull for an official to search and impound a vehicle right out of your own yard?

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Yes.

It wasn't a search. It was an inventory as part of the impound process.

What's the story about your tags?

Contact the impounding agency and/or the towing company and ask how you can go about retrieving the vehicle and obtain any personal property from the vehicle. Chances are that before you can get the vehicle released to you, you will have to clear up whatever registration problems might exist.

Miranda VS City of Cornelius, Supreme court said that the only way a vehicle can be impounded from a private driveway the.impound must comply with the principles of "community caretaking" which in my case the impound had nothing at all to do with community caretaking.

That's your opinion. The officer's opinion appears to be that if you're willing to drive around violating the law, and the way to protect the community against you doing so is impounding the vehicle. As you've already been told, your violation of the law occured on public roadways. You don't get a pass on the consequences of your criminal action just because you reached "base". On the plus side, you absolutely have the freedom to retain a bulldog attorney to try to make that case to the court. Let us know how that works out.

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Quoting MrDurham

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Miranda VS City of Cornelius, Supreme court said that the only way a vehicle can be impounded from a private driveway the.impound must comply with the principles of "community caretaking" which in my case the impound had nothing at all to do with community caretaking.

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Actually, that's a 9th Circuit case ... Ohio is in the 6th Circuit. This case is not binding on Ohio.

And there can be any number of reasons under which the officer impounded the vehicle. And, even if in the 9th Circuit, the car could have still been taken if the community caretaking element could be articulated. In this case, it could be that the officer could articulate that had the vehicle not been towed it was very likely to have continued to have been driven on the street or some similar argument.

Bottom line is that your car was towed. You had best make some phone calls and find out how to get it out of impound as soon as possible or those daily fees will start to rack up!

Sorry.

And we all know california has some laws that are quite different than most other states, especially those closer to the east coast.

And depending on on how one interprets "community care taking" it could be interpreted that your actions endangered the community at large by driving a vehicle that is not allowed to be on the public roads and as such took it into custody specifically to safeguard society in whole.

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Quoting jk

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And we all know california has some laws that are quite different than most other states, especially those closer to the east coast.

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But, the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is NOT just California. Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona ... a rather diverse mish-mash. Even California is not keen on the 9th, so it's certainly not ours. And, Miranda v. City of Cornelius is an Oregon case ta boot!

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And depending on on how one interprets "community care taking" it could be interpreted that your actions endangered the community at large by driving a vehicle that is not allowed to be on the public roads and as such took it into custody specifically to safeguard society in whole.

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Yep. That's why he could even find it impounded even here on the west coast.

I understand that I broke the law and im sure I will be punished for that when I go to court. I have the tickets and a court date. So what was the point of taking the car from my property? If his reasoning was that.of that he may have believed that the car would again been driven illegaly, I have a very clean driving record and am a class A cdl holder. There is nothing that would support that theroy. He wrote the ticket for fictitious registration because I had just bought the car two weeks before. My old car had blown up and I sent it to the scrap yard. I took my tags off of the old car and put them on my new one. Which is perfectly legal in Ohio for thirty days while you are filling for a new registration. The problem was that I didn't have proof that I had scraped the old car and that was his reasoning for the ticket and the impound. I cannot find the law that says that you have to carry proof and he refused to tell me. Also as for the search, he was not doing an inventory he was doing an actual search, looking through everything. He stopped once he realized that I was recording him with my phone. He searched for what seemed like 10 minutes and only wrote 6 items on the inventory list. But I realize this is my problem, just was hoping someone that knew something about the laws in ohio would lead me in the right direction towards a law I use for the impoundment. It's common sense that impound laws were only created to remove vehicles out of the way of the public for safety reasons once a driver has been arrested. Not for the impoundment from ones personal driveway just because of a traffic ticket.