SCOTUS Says Cops Can Stop People Without Cause

Yes, that’s right. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled – by an eight to one margin – that police officers can stop citizens for breaking laws that do not exist….and then use evidence found in a subsequent search to prosecute said citizens under a completely different statute than the non-existent one for which they were originally stopped.

If you have trouble understanding this one, so does Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose dissent was based on her inability to understand, “…why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an interpretative question.” Put more simply for those without the necessary legal education, the Court handed down a decision on December 15 in the matter of Heien vs. North Carolina in which a police officer who stopped a vehicle for a burned out tail light was judged within his rights to subsequently search the vehicle with the owner’s permission and use the evidence found in that search – an undisclosed amount of cocaine – as legal grounds for an arrest.

It turns out, however, that North Carolina law only requires a motor vehicle to have “a” stop lamp, which clearly means just one stop light. Therefore, according to the North Carolina Court of Appeals – which overturned the original conviction – the police officer’s action constituted an “unreasonable search and seizure” that violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The North Carolina State Supreme Court threw out the appellate court verdict, reinstating the conviction and setting the stage for a subsequent Supreme Court case.

In the Court’s decision, the majority of the justices held that, even though the police officer’s understanding of the law was incorrect, and that the traffic stop was therefore invalid, it was not unreasonable for him to assume that the law required two working stop lights and, subsequently, he was within his rights to stop the vehicle. This invalidates the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine, under which evidence obtained through an illegal search is deemed inadmissible. In effect, then, the Roberts court has overturned a 94-year-old legal doctrine first established in Silverthorne Lumber vs United States in 1920, and reiterated by Justice Felix Frankfurter in Nardone vs United States in 1939 in a decision in which Frankfurter coined the poisonous tree metaphor.

The Court, using the reasonable man doctrine, held that the police officer in question – a Surrey County North Carolina Sheriff’s deputy – should not be held responsible for his ignorance of the law when he made the traffic stop that led to the arrest in question, so it is okay to be ignorant of the law when you are a cop. By the same token, one has to wonder what the defendant was thinking about when he gave the deputy permission to search his car, unless he momentarily forgot about the cocaine, which only proves that two stupid people can each make one small mistake that leads to one big problem for the defendant.

Chief Justice John Roberts also cited 19th century maritime laws under which ships at sea were stopped and searched for contraband on the basis of their previous ports of call or subsequent destinations, ignoring the fact that a precedent taking place on the high seas is not an appropriate one for a domestic matter, even though that practice still continues today. Critics of the majority decision point out that the ships in question were of different registries and therefore not universally protected by American law. In her dissent, Sotomayor expressed the belief that the holding had the effect of “further eroding the Fourth Amendment’s protection of civil liberties in a context where that protection has already been worn down.”

Reaction to the Court’s ruling has been swift, and negative. The Los Angeles Times editorialized that the “disappointingly lopsided” 8-1 decision opens the door to more, and more aggressive, fishing expeditions by police departments seeking convictions against suspects by using the same grounds – a misunderstanding of similar statutes – that are designed to restrict such fishing trips. Justice Sotomayor summed up her opposition by observing that such searches could now become protected “so long as  they can attach to their reasonable view of the facts some reasonable legal interpretation (or misinterpretation) that suggests a law has been violated.”

The Chicago Tribune reprinted an essay by Noah Feldman, a Harvard professor of constitutional law writing for Bloomberg News, in which Feldman suggests that while ignorance of the law is no excuse for the citizen, it should be not an acceptable excuse for a police officer either. “But in the situation where the police reasonably think I have violated some nonexistent law, [the police] are not held responsible for the consequences, which include the search — I am. The burden of the police’s ignorance falls on me, not the state. Or least that’s what the Supreme Court has ruled.”

It seems almost obligatory to point out that, in the wake of court decisions that have eroded the right to privacy, this decision continues the erosion of the basic principles under which the original colonies agreed to become the United States of America. It is questionable whether the Constitution would ever have been ratified without the prior agreement to add the Fourth Amendment, along with the other nine, after the first Congress convened. The Court’s most recent holding may have actually been one of the final step in the evisceration of the protections the founders of this country insisted upon before they would agree to sign on the dotted line.