Supreme Court Decision Allows Police To Use Illegal Stops

I’ve meant to write about the outrageous Supreme Court decision this week that strips away some our Fourth Amendment rights to improper search and seizure. Basically, the Court ruled that you can be stopped illegally but, if you happen to have an outstanding warrant, any evidence gleaned from that illegal stop would still be admissible in court.  The case revolved around a police officer who was occasionally monitoring a house for “suspicious drug activity”. Although he did not see when a man named Edward Streiff entered the house, he decided to stop and question him when he left the house. Mr. Streiff was not acting suspiciously and there was clearly no reason to stop him. After getting Streiff’s personal information, he did a routine check and found that Strieff had an outstanding warrant and promptly arrested him. A subsequent search of Streiff found some methamphetamines.

Since there was no real reason to stop Streiff, the methamphetamine evidence should have been thrown out because it was the result of an illegal stop. Incredibly, however, the Court ruled 5-3 that the officer had just made “good-faith mistakes” and the evidence was valid. Justice Thomas wrote that since  there was “no indication that this unlawful stop was part of any systemic or recurrent police misconduct”, it was, in fact, OK.  His very opinion indicates that it was an unlawful stop but apparently we should just ignore that because the office didn’t really mean it. He goes on to say that we shouldn’t worry about police taking advantage of this ruling by making unlawful stops in the hope that there might be an outstanding warrant because “[s]uch wanton conduct would expose police to civil liability”. Has he not heard of “stop and frisk”! As, Kevin Drum rightly notes, “This willful exercise in ivory tower fantasy is breathtaking. Does anyone seriously believe that Officer Fackrell just made an innocent mistake?”

Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg had ringing dissents that actually were grounded in the real world. I will let their words speak for themselves:

“The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.  Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent.”

They continue:

“The Court sees things differently.  To the Court, the fact that a warrant gives an officer cause to arrest a person severs the connection between illegal policing and the resulting discovery of evidence. This is a remarkable proposition: The mere existence of a warrant not only gives an officer legal cause to arrest and search a person, it also forgives an officer who, with no knowledge of the warrant at all, unlawfully stops that person on a whim or hunch…But the Fourth Amendment does not tolerate an officer’s unreasonable searches and seizures just because he did not know any better.  Even officers prone to negligence can learn from courts that exclude illegally obtained evidence.  Indeed, they are perhaps the most in need of the education, whether by the judge’s opinion, the prosecutor’s future guidance, or an updated manual on criminal procedure.  If the officers are in doubt about what the law requires, exclusion gives them an ‘incentive to err on the side of constitutional behavior’.”

Finally, Sotomayor continues on her own in a description of real-world police power:

“Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more.  This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact.  That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, but it may factor in your ethnicity, where you live, what you were wearing, and how you behaved. The officer does not even need to know which law you might have broken so long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous.  The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal.  The officer may next ask for your “consent” to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand “helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.”  If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then “frisk” you for weapons.  This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “‘feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’”  The officer’s control over you does not end with the stop. If the officer chooses, he may handcuff you and take you to jail for doing nothing more than speeding, jaywalking, or “driving [your] pickup truck . . . with [your] 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter . . . without [your] seatbelt fastened.”  At the jail, he can fingerprint you, swab DNA from the inside of your mouth, and force you to “shower with a delousing agent” while you “lift [your] tongue, hold out [your] arms, turn around, and lift [your] genitals.”   Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the “civil death” of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check.  And, of course, if you fail to pay bail or appear for court, a judge will issue a warrant to render you “arrestable on sight” in the future. This case involves a suspicionless stop, one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without justification. As the Justice Department notes, many innocent people are subjected to the humiliations of these unconstitutional searches.  The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner.  But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny.  For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”— instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time.  It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.”  They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.  They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but. I dissent.”

Thank you Sonya! The swing vote in this case was Justice Bryer who joined Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kenndy. What exactly was he thinking?