In a disturbing ruling from the Supreme Court on Monday, a majority of justices ruled that it is constitutional for police to conduct a search if they discover that a person has an existing arrest warrant—even if the original stop of the person was illegal. The ruling scales back a citizen’s Fourth Amendment rights and significantly increases previous understandings of police power.
The vote was 5-3, with Justice Breyer joining the conservative wing of the court. In the majority opinion, Justice Thomas wrote, "Evidence is admissible when the connection between unconstitutional police conduct and the evidence is remote or has been interrupted by some intervening circumstance."
As some critics have pointed out, this decision will have the highest effect on people of color, because of racial profiling. It's also likely to disproportionately affect the poor, since many arrest warrants are for something as small as an unpaid parking ticket.
In arguments, Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor were especially focused on the populations that would be impacted by such a ruling. From SCOTUSBlog:
Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan repeatedly pressed Utah solicitor general Tyler Green about the incentives that would be created if the exclusionary rule [when evidence is inadmissible because of illegal activity on part of law enforcement] doesn’t apply to illegal stops. The police focus their efforts on high-crime neighborhoods, Kagan noted. If many or most people in those neighborhoods have a warrant out for their arrest, don’t the police have an incentive to make illegal stops because the evidence likely will come in anyway? If the point of the exclusionary rule is to deter Fourth Amendment violations, isn’t the exclusionary rule needed to make sure officers don’t make illegal stops just to check for warrants?
It is unbelievable that a conservative court that supposedly believes so deeply in small government would continue to hand over more and more power to law enforcement. In this case, the court reduces the already virtually nonexistent punishments for law enforcement officers that act illegally. It's a concerning ruling that will have massive impact.
The three female Justices dissented, and Sotomayor wrote her own opinion. It may be the most honest assessment of race in the criminal justice system ever seen from the Court, and it deserves more attention than the rest of the opinion. (Although it is a dissent—which unfortunately means her accurate assessment of criminal justice in America is not legally controlling.) The last three paragraphs in particular are worth not only reading, but memorizing. In this section alone, Justice Sotomayor cites W. E. B. Dubois, James Baldwin, Michelle Alexander, and Ta-Nehisi Coates:
This case involves a suspicionless stop, one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without justification. As the Justice Department notes, supra, at 8, 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. See M. Gottschalk, Caught 119–138 (2015). But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. See M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow 95–136 (2010). 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. See, e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963); T. Coates, Between the World and Me (2015).
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. See L. Guinier & G. Torres, The Miner’s Canary 274–283 (2002). 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.
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