Terry v. Ohio
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| Terry v. Ohio | |||||||||||||
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| Argued December 12, 1967 Decided June 10, 1968 |
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| Holding | |||||||||||||
| Law enforcement officers may stop and frisk someone for weapons if they have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has taken or is about to take place and the subject is armed and dangerous without violating the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed. | |||||||||||||
| Court membership | |||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Earl Warren Associate Justices: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Abe Fortas, Thurgood Marshall |
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| Case opinions | |||||||||||||
| Majority by: Warren[1] Joined by: Black, Brennan, Stewart, Fortas, Marshall Concurrence by: Harlan[2] Concurrence by: White[3] Dissent by: Douglas[4] |
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| Laws applied | |||||||||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. IV | |||||||||||||
Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court which ruled that the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures was not violated when a police officer stopped a suspect on the street and searched him without probable cause.
Because of the important interest in protecting the safety of police officers, the Court held that police have the ability to stop someone and do a quick surface search of their outer clothing for weapons. This is allowed if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that a crime has taken or is about to take place and the person stopped is armed and dangerous. This reasonable suspicion must be based on specific and articulable facts and not merely upon the officer's hunch. This permitted police action has subsequently been referred to in short as a "Terry stop and frisk", or simply a "Terry stop." The Terry standard was later extended to temporary detentions of persons in vehicles, known as traffic stops.
The rationale behind the Supreme Court decision revolves around the understanding that, as the opinion notes, "the exclusionary rule has its limitations". The meaning of the rule is to protect persons from unreasonable searches and seizures aimed at gathering evidence, not searches and seizures for other purposes (like prevention of crime or personal protection of police officers).
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[edit] Case
On October 31, 1963, a Cleveland police detective named Martin McFadden saw two men, John W. Terry and Richard Chilton standing on a street corner and appearing suspicious. One would walk past a certain store window, stare in, and walk back to the other and converse for a short period of time. This was repeated about a dozen times, and the detective believed they were "casing" the store for a robbery. The officer approached the two, identified himself as a policeman, and asked their names. When they appeared suspicious in their answers, McFadden patted them down for weapons and discovered that both men were armed. He removed their guns and arrested them for carrying concealed weapons. When the trial court denied his motion to suppress, Terry pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.
The Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, and the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear the case, claiming that no "substantial constitutional question" was involved. The U.S. Supreme Court then agreed to hear the case.
[edit] Majority Opinion
Chief Justice Warren's opinion for the Court began by reciting first principles. The Fourth Amendment protects "people, not places," against "unreasonable searches and seizures." The question the Court confronted was whether "in all the circumstances of this on-the-street encounter," Terry's reasonable expectation of privacy had been impermissibly invaded.
The procedure called "stop and frisk" was not uncontroversial. Police argue that they require a certain flexibility in dealing with quickly evolving and potentially dangerous situations that arise during routine patrol of the streets. On the other hand, those suspicious of giving the police broad investigatory power contended that the police should not be able to assert their authority over citizens without some specific justification upon intrusion into protected personal security, coupled with judicial oversight to ensure that the police do not routinely abuse their authority. For the Court, however, the question was not the propriety of the police actions in the abstract but the admissibility of the evidence obtained through that police action. "In our system evidentiary rulings provide the context in which the judicial process of inclusion and exclusion approves some conduct as comporting with constitutional guarantees and disapproves other actions by state agents." For this purpose the exclusionary rule of Mapp v. Ohio, , had evolved and been applied against both state and federal agents.
Thus the question was not whether the stop-and-frisk procedure was proper by itself, but rather whether the exclusionary rule was an appropriate deterrent of police misconduct during such encounters.
| “ | Proper adjudication of cases in which the exclusionary rule is invoked demands a constant awareness of these limitations. The wholesale harassment by certain elements of the police community, of which minority groups, particularly Negroes, frequently complain, will not be stopped by the exclusion of any evidence from any criminal trial. Yet a rigid and unthinking application of the exclusionary rule, in futile protest against practices which it can never be effectively used to control, may exact a high toll in human injury and frustration of efforts to prevent crime. | ” |
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— Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 14-15
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In view of these concerns, the Court next asked whether it is "always unreasonable for a policeman to seize a person and subject him to a limited search for weapons unless there is probable cause for an arrest."
[edit] When is a person seized?
The Fourth Amendment only applies to seizures, and so the Court had to confront a necessary threshold question -- when is a person "seized" for purposes of the Fourth Amendment? The Court rejected the idea that a "stop and frisk" could categorically never be a search or seizure subject to the protection of the Fourth Amendment. Instead, it made room for the idea that some police action short of a traditional arrest could constitute a seizure -- that is, "whenever a police officer accosts an individual and restrains his freedom to walk away, he has 'seized' that person." Even searches that start out as reasonable may "violate the Fourth Amendment by virtue of their intolerable intensity and scope." Thus, the scope of the search must be justified by the circumstances that led the police to undertake it in the first place.
Thus, when the police detective took hold of Terry and patted him down on that Cleveland street, the detective "seized" Terry and subjected him to a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Thus, Terry could win his case only if the seizure and search were unreasonable -- if they were not justified at the inception and reasonably related to the circumstances that justified the interference in the first place.
[edit] What is reasonable?
The Court assessed the reasonableness of the police activity here by comparing it to activity that would ordinarily require a warrant. "In justifying the particular intrusion the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant the intrusion." In a situation where the police obtained a warrant, they would have brought these facts and inferences to the attention of a judicial officer before embarking on the actions in question. Post hoc judicial review of police activity is equally facilitated by these facts and inferences.
The Court also emphasized that the standard courts should employ is an objective one. "Would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that the action take was appropriate?" Lesser evidence would mean that the Court would tolerate invasions on the privacy of citizens supported by mere hunches -- a result the Court would not tolerate. The reasonableness inquiry takes into account the "nature and extent of the governmental interests involved," including the general interest in crime prevention, the officer's specific concern for his own safety, the citizen's interest in his own privacy and dignity, and the extent to which the particular search in question intruded upon those interests. "Our evaluation of the proper balance that has to be struck in this type of case leads us to conclude that there must be a narrowly drawn authority to permit a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer, where he has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual, regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest the individual for a crime."
[edit] The stop and frisk of Terry was reasonable
These principles led the Court to conclude that the evidence found on Terry's person was properly admitted because the search was reasonable. The detective had observed Terry and his companions acting in a manner he took to be a preface to a stick-up. A reasonable person in the detective's position would have thought that Terry was armed and thus presented a threat to his safety while he was investigating the suspicious behavior he was observing. The events he had witnessed made it reasonable for him to believe that either Terry or his cohorts were armed. "The record evidences the tempered act of a policeman who in the course of an investigation had to make a quick decision as to how to protect himself and others from possible danger, and took limited steps to do so."
In situations such as the one presented in this case, "the sole justification of the search... is the protection of the police officer and others nearby, and it must therefore be confined in scope to an intrusion reasonably designed to discover guns, knives, clubs, or other hidden instruments for the assault of the police officer." The police detective here limited his search to the outer surfaces of Terry's clothing. Thus, the search was reasonably related in scope to the concern for his own safety that justified the stop from the beginning. Accordingly, the Court concluded that the revolver found on Terry's person was properly admitted into evidence.
[edit] Subsequent jurisprudence
Terry set the precedent for Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032 (1983). In an opinion citing Terry written by Justice O'Connor, the Supreme Court ruled that car compartments could be constitutionally searched if an officer had reasonable suspicion.
The scope of Terry was extended in the 2004 Supreme Court case Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, 542 U.S. 177 (2004), which held that police may also demand that the suspect identify himself during a Terry stop without violating the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination.
