Whether five minutes of drug-related investigative questioning of a driver at the beginning of an admittedly pretextual traffic stop violates the rule of Rodriguez v. United States

QUESTIONS PRESENTED FOR REVIEW First, whether five minutes of drug-related investigative questioning of a driver at the beginning of an admittedly pretextual traffic stop, while no traffic investigation was pending — and none was ever pursued, because the officer extracted the driver’s consent to search the car at the end of the investigative questioning — violates the rule of Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct.'1609 (2015), that “[a] seizure justified only by a police-observed traffic violation . . . becomes unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a ticket for the violation.” /d. at 1612 (internal brackets and quotation marks omitted). Second, whether Rodriguez also squarely precludes the government from justifying such a prolongation of a traffic stop on the alternative grounds that the officer had developed reasonable suspicion of drug activity by the time of the search, where such suspicion was not independent of and prior to the unconstitutional delay, but rather exclusively based on information learned during the non-traffic-related investigative questioning at the beginning of the stop. i INTERESTED PARTIES There are no