Reported / Citable
Background
At approximately 3:35 a.m. on August 5, 2023, Hurst Police Officer Julio Marroquin observed Joram Wambugu Murichu’s vehicle weaving and then crossing the dotted yellow center line of Precinct Line Road — a four-lane, two-way road — with the car’s left two tires entering the oncoming traffic lanes. No other vehicles were present at that moment. Marroquin stopped Murichu and ultimately arrested him for driving while intoxicated with an alcohol concentration of 0.15 or higher under Texas Penal Code § 49.04(d).
Murichu moved to suppress all evidence obtained from the warrantless stop and arrest. At the suppression hearing, the trial court found as fact that Murichu’s vehicle had crossed the yellow dotted center line into oncoming traffic, but granted the motion to suppress, relying on State v. Hardin, 664 S.W.3d 867 (Tex. Crim. App. 2022). The trial court concluded that because there were no other cars present and the single weave posed no danger, the officer lacked reasonable suspicion. The State timely appealed.
The sole evidence at the suppression hearing was Officer Marroquin’s testimony; no video footage was admitted. The State stipulated that the arrest was warrantless and argued on appeal that the trial court had misapplied the law to its own factual findings.
The Court’s Holding
The Second Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the trial court’s own fact findings — that Murichu’s vehicle crossed the center line into oncoming lanes — compelled the legal conclusion that Officer Marroquin had reasonable suspicion to stop and probable cause to arrest Murichu for a violation of Texas Transportation Code § 545.051(a), which prohibits driving left of the center line on a four-or-more-lane roadway. Because the operative statute does not contain a “unless the movement can be made safely” exception, evidence of danger or unsafe conditions was legally irrelevant to whether a violation occurred.
The court distinguished Hardin, which construed a different statute — Transportation Code § 545.060(a) — governing failure to maintain a single marked lane within a roadway. Under Hardin, a § 545.060(a) violation requires that the lane departure be made unsafely. Section 545.051, by contrast, contains no such safety exception, and the Court of Criminal Appeals did not even address § 545.051 in Hardin. The appellate court therefore held that Hardin was inapplicable and that the trial court had misapplied it.
Applying de novo review to the purely legal question of whether the undisputed facts supported reasonable suspicion, the court sustained the State’s single issue, reversed the suppression order, and remanded for further proceedings.
Key Takeaways
- Crossing the center line into oncoming lanes on a multi-lane road is a per se violation of Tex. Transp. Code § 545.051 — unlike § 545.060(a), the statute has no “safe movement” exception, so the absence of other traffic is legally irrelevant.
- State v. Hardin‘s “unsafe movement” requirement applies only to § 545.060(a) (failure to maintain a single lane within a roadway) and does not extend to center-line crossing under § 545.051.
- When a trial court makes fact findings that themselves establish a statutory traffic violation, an appellate court reviews the resulting legal conclusion de novo and may reverse even a suppression ruling that turned on the trial court’s assessment of the facts.
Why It Matters
This decision clarifies an important boundary between two commonly litigated Texas traffic statutes in the wake of Hardin. Defense attorneys had begun invoking Hardin‘s safety-based analysis broadly to challenge traffic stops, but the Second Court of Appeals — consistent with at least two other intermediate courts — has now made clear that Hardin is statute-specific. Officers who observe a driver cross the center line of a multi-lane road have probable cause for a stop and arrest under § 545.051 without any need to show that the movement created a hazard.
For prosecutors and law enforcement, the ruling reaffirms that center-line violations on four-lane roads remain a reliable, legally sufficient basis for DWI investigations, even in the early morning hours with little traffic. Defense practitioners should take care to distinguish which subsection of Chapter 545 underlies a stop before relying on Hardin as controlling authority.