A Pretextual Traffic Stop Should Require Sufficient Pretext

Several years ago, Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf asked Twitter “If you could add one Bill of Rights style amendment to the Constitution what would it be?” I responded “The Fourth Amendment and “we mean it.””

My answer may have been tongue-in-cheek, but quite seriously, the Fourth Amendment and its protections have been eroded by the Supreme Court precedents over several decades. As a result, the power of the police to intrude upon the lives of individuals has grown and they have taken advantage of that power throughout the country.

The Fourth Amendment reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In plain English, the amendment should mean—among other things—that the police cannot stop (or “seize”) you on the street for no good reason. In the context of traffic stops, the Supreme Court held in Whren v. U.S. (1996) that the police had to have probable cause to believe the driver or vehicle is in violation of a traffic law. In the abstract, Whren makes perfect sense: If an officer observes a moving violation, he or she can stop a driver to address the issue.

In practice, however, Whren has provided virtual carte blanche for police to stop motorists due to innumerable traffic laws, many of which are vague and subjective, that most drivers violate every time they get behind the wheel. As I explained in my 2016 Case Western Reserve Law Review article “Thin Blue Lies,” police routinely use these myriad violations as pretext to stop motorists and investigate other crimes entirely unrelated to traffic safety. Officers understand if they follow any driver long enough, they can almost certainly find a pretext for stopping the vehicle and conducting an informal roadside investigation, subverting the spirit (if not the letter) of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against arbitrary seizure.

Despite this gaping hole in Fourth Amendment protections, police officers in Nebraska initiated a traffic stop on a vehicle without probable cause of any traffic violation whatsoever. (This isn’t hyperbole. In court filings, the State of Nebraska stipulates there was no traffic violation.) As a result of the stop, the driver of the vehicle, Mr. Colton Sievers, was questioned and eventually arrested for methamphetamine possession after a search of his vehicle. He moved to have the evidence thrown out because the original stop was an illegal seizure under the Fourth Amendment.

In a rather unusual decision, the Supreme Court of Nebraska found that the stop was legal under a different case, Illinois v. Lidster (2004), which allowed police to stop vehicles at checkpoint to seek eyewitnesses to a recent crime in the area, not to investigate drivers for criminal wrongdoing. The merits of that decision aside, neither Sievers nor the State of Nebraska argued Lidster would have permitted the stop at issue in the present case.

So unusual is the Nebraska Supreme Court decision that law professor Orin Kerr, to whom Cato scholars often find ourselves in opposition regarding Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, has joined the Sievers legal team and co-authored a cert petition to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS). The petition asks SCOTUS to either hear Sievers v. Nebraska or summarily reverse the decision below.

In a Volokh Conspiracy blogpost about the Nebraska Supreme Court decision, Kerr wrote:

It's true that Lidster allowed a suspicionless "information-seeking" checkpoint stop, which is effectively an exception to the usual rule that reasonable suspicion is required under Terry v. Ohio. [note: Terry v. Ohio (1968) preceded Whren, requiring police to have reasonable suspicion to initiate a pedestrian stop.] But the key to Lidster was that the officers were only trying to find innocent eyewitnesses to a past crime. The police set up the checkpoint at the scene of the accident hoping to find a member of the public who had seen the crime and might be able to give the police some leads. This fell out of the usual Terry requirement of suspicion, the Lidster Court held, because the police where just asking members of the general public if they could help the police.

[…]

It seems obvious that Sievers was different. This was not a case of "seeking information from the public." The officers testified that they stopped the truck because they thought it might contain evidence of crime -- specifically, stolen goods that they thought were being stored at the house where the truck had been parked. When the stop occurred, the officer who ordered the stop "advised the [other] officers to make a traffic stop to prevent the truck from leaving with any stolen items." The lead officer explained that they need to stop and search the truck "for any items taken from the [firearms] burglary."

And when Sievers was stopped, the officers didn't treat him like a member of the public who perhaps just might have seen a crime. Instead, Sievers was treated as a dangerous suspect.

Hopefully, SCOTUS agrees to hear the Sievers case or summarily reverses the Nebraska Supreme Court. SCOTUS has already ceded too much leeway to police to stop motorists as pretext, but police officers should at least meet the minimum standard for a legal stop.

You can read the whole cert petition here.