Supreme Court Sides With Police In 4th Amendment Case Arising from Officer’s ‘Mistake of Law’

In a
decision issued this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the
police in a case arising from an officer’s “mistake of law.” At
issue in
Heien v. North Carolina was a 2009 traffic stop for a
single busted brake light that led to the discovery of illegal
drugs inside the vehicle. According to state law at the time,
however, motor vehicles were required only to have “a stop lamp,”
meaning that the officer did not have a lawful reason for the
initial traffic stop because it was not a crime to drive around
with a single busted brake light. Did that stop therefore violate
the 4th Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and
seizure? Writing today for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts
held that it did not. “Because the officer’s mistake about the
brake-light law was reasonable,” Roberts
declared, “the stop in this case was lawful under the Fourth
Amendment.”

Roberts’ opinion was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony
Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer,
Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan. Writing alone in dissent, Justice
Sonia Sotomayor criticized her colleagues for giving the police far
too much leeway. “One is left to wonder,” she wrote, “why an
innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being
seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an interpretative
question.” In Sotomayor’s view, “an officer’s mistake of law, no
matter how reasonable, cannot support the individualized suspicion
necessary to justify a seizure under the Fourth Amendment.”

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Heien v. North Carolina
is available here.