Title: Commonwealth v. Long

State: massachusetts

Issuer: Massachusetts Supreme Court

Document:

NOTICE:  All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal 
revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound 
volumes of the Official Reports.  If you find a typographical 
error or other formal error, please notify the Reporter of 
Decisions, Supreme Judicial Court, John Adams Courthouse, 1 
Pemberton Square, Suite 2500, Boston, MA, 02108-1750; (617) 557-
1030; SJCReporter@sjc.state.ma.us 
 
SJC-12868 
 
COMMONWEALTH  v.  EDWARD LONG. 
 
 
 
Suffolk.     March 3, 2020. - September 17, 2020. 
 
Present:  Gants, C.J., Lenk, Gaziano, Lowy, Budd, Cypher, 
& Kafker, JJ.1 
 
 
Threshold Police Inquiry.  Constitutional Law, Equal protection 
of laws.  Practice, Criminal, Motion to suppress.  
Evidence, Profile, Statistics. 
 
 
 
 
Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court 
Department on February 9, 2018. 
 
 
A pretrial motion to suppress evidence was heard by Joseph 
F. Leighton, Jr., J. 
 
 
An application for leave to file an interlocutory appeal 
was allowed by Lenk, J., in the Supreme Judicial Court for the 
county of Suffolk, and the appeal was reported by her. 
 
 
 
John P. Warren for the defendant. 
 
Cailin M. Campbell, Assistant District Attorney, for the 
Commonwealth. 
 
Rebecca Kiley, Committee for Public Counsel Services, 
Matthew R. Segal, Jessica Lewis, & Jessie J. Rossman, for 
Committee for Public Counsel Services & another, amici curiae, 
submitted a brief. 
                     
 
1 Chief Justice Gants participated in the deliberation on 
this case and authored his concurrence prior to his death. 
2 
 
 
 
Oren N. Nimni, Katharine Naples-Mitchell, Chauncey B. Wood, 
& Radha Natarajan, for Massachusetts Association of Criminal 
Defense Lawyers & others, amici curiae, submitted a brief. 
 
 
GAZIANO, J.  At about eleven o'clock on a November morning, 
two members of the Boston police department's youth violence 
strike force, who had been driving an unmarked vehicle, noticed 
a maroon Mercedes pass in front of them on a residential street.  
The driver was a Black man.  The officers decided to query the 
vehicle's license plate in their onboard computer.  The results 
returned indicated that the vehicle was registered to a Black 
woman and that it lacked an inspection sticker.  The officers 
stopped the vehicle.  When they learned that the driver, the 
defendant, had outstanding warrants and his driver's license was 
suspended, they searched the vehicle and found a gun in a bag on 
the rear passenger seat. 
The defendant subsequently was charged with several 
firearms offenses.2  He moved to suppress the evidence seized 
from the vehicle, on the ground that the motor vehicle stop was 
the product of selective enforcement based on race, and the 
                     
2 The defendant was charged with unlawful possession of a 
firearm, G. L. c. 269, § 10 (a), as well as an enhancement for 
two previous convictions of violent crimes or serious drug 
offenses, G. L. c. 269, § 10G; carrying a loaded firearm, G. L. 
c. 269, § 10 (n); possession of ammunition, G. L. c. 269, 
§ 10 (h); possession of a large capacity feeding device, G. L. 
c. 269, § 10 (m); and receiving a firearm with a defaced 
identification number, G. L. c. 269, § 11C. 
3 
 
 
inventory search of the vehicle was impermissible.  A Superior 
Court judge determined that the defendant had not met his 
initial burden to raise a reasonable inference that the stop had 
been made been motivated by race, and that the decision to 
impound the vehicle was reasonable in the circumstances; he 
therefore denied the motion.  The defendant sought leave in the 
county court to pursue an interlocutory appeal; the single 
justice allowed the application and ordered the appeal to be 
conducted in this court. 
 
We conclude that the Superior Court judge abused his 
discretion in denying the motion to suppress, because the 
defendant produced sufficient evidence to raise a reasonable 
inference that the stop was racially motivated.  Nonetheless, we 
are persuaded that, in our efforts in Commonwealth v. Lora, 451 
Mass. 425, 436-438 (2008), to ease the burden on defendants, we 
set the bar too high for defendants attempting to establish a 
reasonable inference of a discriminatory stop.  In practice, 
providing statistical evidence sufficient to raise a reasonable 
inference that a motor vehicle stop was racially motivated, 
given the limitations of available police data, has proved 
infeasible for defendants.  The judge's ruling well illustrates 
the concerns repeatedly raised about the difficulty of meeting 
the requirements set forth in Lora, supra at 447-449.  See 
4 
 
 
Commonwealth v. Buckley, 478 Mass. 861, 879-880 (2018) (Budd, 
J., concurring), and cases cited. 
 
Thus, in order to ensure that drivers who are subjected to 
racially motivated traffic stops have a viable means by which to 
vindicate their rights to the equal protection of the laws, as 
provided by the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, we today 
establish a revised test.  A defendant seeking to suppress 
evidence based on a claim that a traffic stop violated 
principles of equal protection bears the burden of establishing, 
by motion, a reasonable inference that the officer's decision to 
initiate the stop was motivated by race or another protected 
class.  To raise this inference, the defendant must point to 
specific facts from the totality of the circumstances 
surrounding the stop; the inference need not be based in 
statistical analysis.  If this inference is established, the 
defendant is entitled to a hearing at which the Commonwealth 
would have the burden of rebutting the inference.  Absent a 
successful rebuttal, any evidence derived from the stop would be 
suppressed.3 
                     
3 We acknowledge the amicus briefs submitted by the 
Committee for Public Counsel Services and the American Civil 
Liberties Union of Massachusetts, Inc.; and by the Massachusetts 
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, The New England 
Innocence Project, Lawyers for Civil Rights, and the Charles 
Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law 
School. 
5 
 
 
 
1.  Background.  We present the facts as found by the 
motion judge, supplemented by uncontroverted facts from the 
record that the judge "explicitly or implicitly credited," 
reserving certain details for discussion.  See Commonwealth v. 
Jones-Pannell, 472 Mass. 429, 431 (2015) ("Although an appellate 
court may supplement a motion judge's subsidiary findings with 
evidence from the record that is uncontroverted and undisputed 
and where the judge explicitly or implicitly credited the 
witness's testimony, . . . it may do so only so long as the 
supplemented facts do not detract from the judge's ultimate 
findings" [quotations and citations omitted]). 
 
At approximately 11 A.M. on November 28, 2017, the 
defendant, a young Black man, was driving a Mercedes sport 
utility vehicle (SUV) on a well-traveled and largely residential 
road in the Clam Point section of Boston.  Two plainclothes 
officers from the Boston police department's youth violence 
strike force (gang unit)4 were sitting in an unmarked vehicle on 
a side street, where they were waiting to make a right turn onto 
the road on which the defendant was driving. 
 
The defendant drove past the side street, and the officers 
turned onto the main road directly behind his vehicle.  They did 
                     
 
4 The primary purpose of the Boston police department's 
youth violence strike force is proactively to reduce gang and 
gun violence and drug activity in Boston. 
6 
 
 
not observe a traffic violation, but one of the officers decided 
to enter the vehicle's license plate number into the Criminal 
Justice Information Services (CJIS) database.  The query 
revealed that the defendant's vehicle was registered to a Black 
woman, later identified by the defendant as his girlfriend.  The 
query also showed that the vehicle did not have a current 
inspection sticker. 
 
The officers decided to stop the vehicle on the basis of 
the missing inspection sticker.  When the officers activated 
their lights and siren, the defendant pulled into a lawful 
parking spot on the side of the street.  The officers requested 
his driver's license; the defendant explained that he did not 
have a driver's license, only a permit, which he provided the 
officers.  Although they had never encountered each other, one 
of the officers recognized the defendant's name and photograph 
from the gang unit's database.  After conducting a query of the 
defendant's information in the CJIS database, the officers 
learned that his driver's license was suspended, and that he had 
two default warrants for operating without a license and failure 
to identify himself.  The officers ordered him out of the 
vehicle and handcuffed him. 
The officers, who testified that they were aware of thefts, 
vandalism, and shootings in the vicinity, decided to tow and 
impound what they deemed to be a "high-end" vehicle, which did 
7 
 
 
not belong to the defendant.5  Before towing the vehicle, one 
officer began to search it.  During the search, he observed what 
he believed was the handle of a gun inside an open bag on the 
rear passenger seat.  Once he confirmed that the object indeed 
was a firearm, he read the defendant the Miranda warnings and 
then inquired whether the defendant had a license to carry a 
firearm.  When the defendant responded that he did not, the 
officers called dispatch to transport the defendant to the 
police station. 
2.  Prior proceedings.  The defendant filed a motion to 
suppress the evidence seized from the vehicle on the ground that 
the stop was impermissible because it was the result of 
selective enforcement of the traffic laws based on race, and the 
inventory search was an unlawful search for investigatory 
purposes, as impoundment of the vehicle was not necessary.  The 
defendant obtained an expert in statistics (a mathematics 
professor who has published numerous articles and reports, and 
had testified previously in the Superior Court and the District 
Court).  The expert testified at an evidentiary hearing on the 
motion, and introduced a report on her findings.  The judge 
                     
 
5 At the hearing on the defendant's motion to suppress, one 
of the officers testified that, in cases where he was arresting 
the driver and the driver was not the owner of the vehicle, he 
routinely had the vehicle towed unless the owner arrived at the 
scene. 
8 
 
 
found that the datasets used by the expert were "insufficiently 
reliable to yield results that could raise a reasonable 
inference of impermissible discrimination," and denied the 
motion.  The defendant filed a timely notice of appeal and an 
application in the county court for leave to pursue an 
interlocutory appeal.  See Mass. R. Crim. P. 15 (a) (2), as 
amended, 476 Mass. 1501 (2017).  The single justice allowed the 
appeal to proceed in this court. 
 
3.  Discussion.  In Lora, 451 Mass. at 437-438, we adapted 
general principles of our jurisprudence on selective prosecution 
in an attempt to address the persistent and pernicious problem 
of racial profiling in traffic enforcement.  Today, we conclude 
that that decision placed too great an evidentiary burden on 
defendants, and that we must lower this burden in order to 
create a viable path for individuals to present and demonstrate 
their claims of racial profiling in traffic stops.  While 
defendants still may raise a reasonable inference of racial 
profiling by demonstrating consistent patterns of racially 
disparate traffic enforcement by the officer involved, they also 
may raise a reasonable inference that a stop was racially 
motivated based on the totality of the circumstances surrounding 
the particular traffic stop at issue. 
 
Furthermore, in our view the problem of discriminatory 
traffic stops continues to be best addressed under our equal 
9 
 
 
protection jurisprudence and not, as Justice Budd's concurrence 
suggests, the search and seizure doctrine of art. 14 of the 
Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.  As to the stop of this 
defendant, even under the overly heavy evidentiary burden that 
resulted from our decision in Lora, we conclude that he 
presented more than adequate data to support his claim, and thus 
that the judge erred in denying his motion to suppress. 
 
a.  Equal protection framework.  Our guarantee of equal 
protection under the law derives both from the Fourteenth 
Amendment to the United States Constitution and arts. 1 and 10 
of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.  When the Fourteenth 
Amendment was ratified after the Civil War, its "primary 
objective . . . was the freedom of [African-Americans], the 
security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the 
protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the 
oppressions of those who formerly had exercised unlimited 
dominion over him" (quotation and citation omitted).  Flowers v. 
Mississippi, 139 S. Ct. 2228, 2238 (2019).  Art. 1 has a similar 
purpose.  Ratified as part of the Massachusetts Declaration of 
Rights in 1780, the article was the basis of the judicial 
abolition of slavery in 1781, see Jackson v. Phillips, 14 Allen 
539, 563 (1867), and subsequent decisions applying the guarantee 
10 
 
 
of equal protection to African-Americans.6  See, e.g., 
Commonwealth v. Aves, 18 Pick. 193, 210 (1836). 
 
Under these constitutional guarantees, the racism in which 
our nation had been steeped was to yield to the promise of 
equality.  See Williams v. Illinois, 399 U.S. 235, 245 (1970) 
("the constitutional imperatives of the Equal Protection Clause 
must have priority over the comfortable convenience of the 
status quo").  And, indeed, many explicitly discriminatory laws 
did fall.  See, e.g., McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184, 184 
(1964). 
 
All too frequently, however, the prohibition against 
facially discriminatory laws has been inadequate to address the 
role played by racism and other invidious classifications in the 
                     
 
6 These protections, of course, also apply to suspect 
classifications other than those based on race.  "The Equal 
Protection Clause was intended to work nothing less than the 
abolition of all caste-based and invidious class-based 
legislation."  Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 213 (1982).  Under 
the Federal Constitution, the guarantee of equal protection 
forbids the government from making suspect classifications, 
include those based on race, religion, nationality, alienage, or 
membership in another discrete and insular minority, unless the 
governmental action survives strict scrutiny.  See, e.g., New 
Orleans v. Dukes, 427 U.S. 297, 303-304 (1976); Graham v. 
Richardson, 403 U.S. 365, 372 (1971), citing United States v. 
Carolene Prods. Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152-153 n.4 (1938); Graham, 
supra at 376.  See also Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 500 
(1954) (applying equal protection guarantee against Federal 
government under Fifth Amendment to United States Constitution).  
Our State Constitution goes further and applies strict scrutiny 
review to sex and gender classifications as well.  See Finch v. 
Commonwealth Health Ins. Connector Auth., 459 Mass. 655, 665-666 
(2011), S.C., 461 Mass. 232 (2012). 
11 
 
 
way facially neutral laws actually are enforced.  See Buckley, 
478 Mass. at 871 (sharing "considerable, legitimate concerns 
regarding racial profiling and the impact of such practices on 
communities of color"); Lora, 451 Mass. at 449 (Ireland, J., 
concurring); Commonwealth v. Feyenord, 445 Mass. 72, 88 (2005), 
cert. denied, 546 U.S. 1187 (2006) (Greaney, J., concurring); 
Commonwealth v. Gonsalves, 429 Mass. 658, 670 (1999) (Ireland, 
J., concurring). 
 
Thus, it long has been held that "[t]he equal protection 
principles of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . and arts. 1 and 
10 . . . prohibit discriminatory application of impartial laws."  
See Lora, 451 Mass. at 436, quoting Commonwealth v. Franklin 
Fruit Co., 388 Mass. 228, 229–230 (1983).  See also New York 
Times Co. v. Commissioner of Revenue, 427 Mass. 399, 406 (1998), 
citing Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 373 (1886).  While some 
selectivity or discretion must be tolerated in criminal law 
enforcement, that selectivity is permissible only so long as it 
"is not based on an 'unjustifiable standard such as race, 
religion or other arbitrary classification.'"  Lora, supra 
at 437, quoting Commonwealth v. King, 374 Mass. 5, 20 (1977).  
See Oyler v. Boles, 368 U.S. 448, 456 (1962). 
 
Consistent with Federal equal protection law, we have held 
that a prosecution brought based on an impermissible 
classification must be dismissed.  See King, 374 Mass. at 22.  
12 
 
 
"Because we presume that criminal prosecutions are undertaken in 
good faith, without intent to discriminate, the defendant bears 
the initial burden of . . . present[ing] evidence which raises 
at least a reasonable inference of impermissible 
discrimination."  Commonwealth v. Franklin, 376 Mass. 885, 894 
(1978), and cases cited.  To support this inference, a defendant 
must show that "a broader class of persons than those prosecuted 
has violated the law, . . . that failure to prosecute was either 
consistent or deliberate, . . . and that the decision not to 
prosecute was based on an impermissible classification such as 
race, religion, or sex" (citations omitted).  See id.  "If a 
defendant meets this prima facie showing, the case must be 
dismissed unless the Commonwealth is able to rebut the inference 
of selective prosecution."  Commonwealth v. Wilbur W., 479 Mass. 
397, 409 (2018), citing Commonwealth v. Bernardo B., 453 Mass. 
158, 168 (2008). 
 
This court has identified the discriminatory enforcement of 
traffic laws as particularly toxic.  "Years of data bear out 
what many have long known from experience:  police stop drivers 
of color disproportionately more often than Caucasian drivers 
for insignificant violations (or provide no reason at all)."  
Buckley, 478 Mass. at 876-877 (Budd, J., concurring).  See 
Pierson, Simou, Overgoor, Corbett-Davis, Jenson, Shoemaker, 
Ramachandran, Barghouty, Phillips, Shroff, & Goel, A Large-Scale 
13 
 
 
Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police Stops Across the United 
States, 4 Nature Human Behavior 736, 736, 737 (2020) (analysis 
of approximately 95 million stops nationwide found that 
"[r]elative to their share of the residential population, . . . 
[B]lack drivers were, on average, stopped more often than white 
drivers," and that Black drivers comprised a smaller share of 
drivers stopped at night, when it is harder for officers to 
detect race, "suggest[ing] [B]lack drivers were stopped during 
daylight hours in part because of their race"). 
 
The discriminatory enforcement of traffic laws is not a 
minor annoyance to those who are racially profiled.  To the 
contrary, these discriminatory practices cause great harm.  See 
Buckley, 478 Mass. at 877 (Budd, J., concurring), citing 
Feyenord, 445 Mass. at 88 (Greaney, J., concurring) ("to a 
Caucasian driver a traffic stop may be annoying or embarrassing, 
but for a driver of color, such a stop can be humiliating and 
painful. . . . Further, recent tragic events have shown that the 
fear people of color have of being stopped by police is 
justified:  African–Americans have been killed during routine 
traffic stops").  See also Utah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056, 
2069 (2016) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) ("unlawful 'stops' have 
severe consequences much greater than the inconvenience 
suggested by the name. . . . When we condone officers' use of 
14 
 
 
these devices without adequate cause, we . . . risk treating 
members of our communities as second-class citizens"). 
 
While the constitutional principle at stake in this case is 
exceedingly clear -- police may not target drivers for traffic 
stops, citations, and further investigation because of their 
race -- the evidentiary difficulties in identifying racially 
motivated traffic stops are profound.  The traffic stop often 
constitutes the first and only interaction between a police 
officer and the occupants of a stopped vehicle; the interaction 
thus generally provides a minimal amount of direct evidence of 
the officer's motivations for the particular stop.  
Additionally, the plethora of potential traffic violations is 
such that most drivers are unable to avoid committing minor 
traffic violations on a routine basis, thereby affording 
officers wide discretion in the enforcement of traffic laws.  
See State v. Ladson, 138 Wash. 2d 343, 358 n.10 (1999), citing 
Shakow, Let He Who Never Has Turned Without Signaling Cast the 
First Stone:  An Analysis of Whren v. United States, 24 Am. J. 
Crim. L. 627, 633 (1997). 
 
b.  The Lora selective prosecution analysis.  Due to these 
challenges, in combination with the urgent need to deter 
discriminatory policing, in Lora, 451 Mass. at 437, we attempted 
to adapt the principles of selective prosecution to the unique 
evidentiary challenges posed by claims of discriminatory traffic 
15 
 
 
stops.  We did so by relying upon the preexisting burden-
shifting analysis of our selective prosecution framework, but 
expanding the ways in which a defendant could meet his or her 
initial burden. 
 
In the first stage of that analysis, a defendant must 
"'present evidence which raises at least a reasonable inference 
of impermissible discrimination,' including evidence that 'a 
broader class of persons than those prosecuted has violated the 
law, . . . that failure to prosecute was either consistent or 
deliberate, . . . and that the decision not to prosecute was 
based on an impermissible classification such as race, religion, 
or sex.'"  Lora, 451 Mass. at 437, quoting Franklin, 376 Mass. 
at 894.  Because of the difficulty of showing that a particular 
officer's intent in making a specific motor vehicle stop was 
racially motivated, however, we held that the defendant's burden 
could be met through the presentation of evidence of that 
officer's motor vehicle stops in other cases.  See Lora, supra 
at 442. 
 
By allowing reasonable inferences based on broader patterns 
involving other defendants, our holding in Lora avoided the 
limitations that have been placed on Federal equal protection 
claims based on variances in statistics since the United States 
Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 
292-293, 297-298, 311-313 (1987).  In that case, the Court 
16 
 
 
determined that the statistical data presented by the defendant 
demonstrated a correlation between race and the imposition of 
the death penalty, but was insufficient to show causation in the 
defendant's specific case.  With respect to the protections 
against selective enforcement of traffic laws under our State 
constitution, we stated that the evidence presented by a 
defendant, "[a]t a minimum, . . . must establish that the racial 
composition of motorists stopped for motor vehicle violations 
varied significantly from the racial composition of the 
population of motorists making use of the relevant roadways, and 
who therefore could have encountered the officer or officers 
whose actions have been called into question."  Lora, 451 Mass. 
at 442. 
 
As with any other selective enforcement claim, if a 
defendant raises a reasonable inference that a stop was 
motivated by race, the burden shifts to the Commonwealth to 
rebut the inference.  See Lora, 451 Mass. at 438.  Unlike other 
types of selective prosecution cases, however, if the 
Commonwealth fails to rebut that inference in the context of a 
traffic stop, the remedy is not dismissal.  Because the 
discriminatory enforcement of traffic laws is more closely tied 
to the evidence obtained as a result of the stop, rather than 
the decision to bring criminal charges based on that evidence, 
we concluded that suppression was the correct remedy for a 
17 
 
 
traffic stop that violated the guarantees of equal protection in 
arts. 1 and 10.  See id. at 438-439. 
 
c.  Revising the evidentiary requirements of Lora.  Our 
decision in Lora was intended to make it easier for defendants 
to establish racial discrimination by allowing them to raise a 
reasonable inference of racial profiling based on an officer's 
conduct in other traffic stops.  From this pattern of unequal 
treatment, and in the absence of explicit "smoking gun" evidence 
concerning that particular stop, a judge could infer that the 
challenged stop of an individual defendant was motivated by 
race.  Importantly, this mechanism also allows defendants a 
means by which to detect and challenge implicit bias, by 
demonstrating that an officer's pattern of behavior toward 
members of the protected class of which the defendant is a 
member showed discrimination, regardless of the officer's lack 
of awareness of any bias. 
 
When Lora was decided, it was believed that data regarding 
the traffic stops made by individual police officers throughout 
the Commonwealth, and the demographics of the individuals 
stopped, would be readily available to defendants.  See Lora, 
451 Mass. at 446 & n.33, n.34.  See also Boston Police 
Patrolmen's Ass'n, Inc. v. Police Dep't of Boston, 446 Mass. 46, 
48-49 (2006), discussing St. 2000, c. 228, § 10.  Unfortunately, 
that assumption has not been borne out in practice.  A statute 
18 
 
 
enacted in 2000, effective for a limited period of time, 
mandated that police departments that appeared to have engaged 
in racial profiling in motor vehicle stops collect detailed data 
on stops made by each officer, and the races of the driver 
stopped.  See St. 2000, c. 228, § 10.   That statute, however, 
expired by its terms, and a replacement was not enacted.  See 
id. (requiring one year of data collection, followed by 
additional year of broader data collection for departments found 
to have engaged in racial or gender profiling).  Instead, our 
effort to ease the burden on defendants has been unsuccessful 
due to inadequate or inaccessible data.  See Buckley, 478 Mass. 
at 880 (Budd, J., concurring); Lora, 451 Mass. at 449 (Ireland, 
J., concurring).  Consequently, since 2008 when Lora was 
decided, we are aware of only one case in which a defendant 
successfully moved to suppress evidence under it.  See 
Commonwealth vs. Vargas, Middlesex Superior Court 
No. 1481CR1135, slip op. at 1, 16 (Aug. 16, 2019). 
 
Although we conclude that the defendant here also met his 
burden under the existing Lora standard, it is clear that Lora 
has placed too great an evidentiary burden on defendants.  The 
right of drivers to be free from racial profiling will remain 
illusory unless and until it is supported by a workable remedy.  
Therefore, the time has come to address Lora's practical 
shortcomings. 
19 
 
 
 
i.  Defendants' revised burden.  Although Lora, 451 Mass. 
at 440-442, focused on how statistical evidence could be used to 
meet a defendant's initial burden of raising a reasonable 
inference of discrimination, we did not say in that case that 
statistical evidence would replace the previous means of 
establishing a violation of equal protection, and would become 
the only way in which an inference that a stop was motivated by 
race could be raised.  See id. at 442 ("We are of the view that 
statistical evidence may be used to meet a defendant's initial 
burden of producing sufficient evidence to raise a reasonable 
inference of impermissible discrimination" [emphasis added]). 
 
Indeed, in the broader jurisprudence on selective 
enforcement, both nationally and in Massachusetts, the evidence 
necessary to raise a reasonable inference of discrimination need 
not be statistical.  See, e.g., Wilbur W., 479 Mass. at 409, 
quoting Bernardo B., 453 Mass. at 168 ("defendant raising a 
selective prosecution claim may do so 'by introducing 
statistical evidence or other data demonstrating that similarly 
situated suspects or defendants are treated differently by the 
prosecutor on the basis of impermissible categorizations'" 
[emphasis supplied]); Franklin, 376 Mass. at 894 (testimonial 
evidence was used to support claim of selective prosecution); 
Marshall v. Columbia Lea Reg'l Hosp., 345 F.3d 1157, 1168 (10th 
Cir. 2003) ("[the defendant] seeks to prove the racially 
20 
 
 
selective nature of his stop and arrest not by means of 
statistical inference but by direct evidence of [the officer's] 
behavior during the events in question").  Nor must the asserted 
discrimination be "systematic [or] long-continued."  See Snowden 
v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1, 9–10 (1944). 
 
In light of the persistent difficulties attendant to using 
statistical data to meet a claim under Lora, however, we now 
must develop more fully the other ways in which defendants may 
show that a stop was based on an impermissible classification.  
Cf. Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 92 (1986) (previous 
decisions that required comprehensive statistics showing prior 
discriminatory action amounted to "crippling burden of proof" on 
defendants attempting to vindicate rights to equal protection).  
Therefore, while the use of statistical data continues to be one 
means by which a defendant may raise a reasonable inference that 
the challenged traffic stop was racially motivated, we today 
expand and clarify the other ways in which such an inference may 
be raised, by evidence of the totality of the circumstances 
surrounding the stop itself. 
 
Moreover, not only must the categories of permissible 
evidence be altered; the way in which defendants may establish a 
reasonable inference of discrimination also requires 
modification.  Under general selective prosecution analysis, a 
defendant's initial showing must include evidence "that a 
21 
 
 
broader class of persons than those prosecuted violated the 
law, . . . that failure to prosecute was either consistent or 
deliberate, . . . and that the decision not to prosecute was 
based on an impermissible classification such as race, religion, 
or sex."  See Bernardo B., 453 Mass. at 168, quoting Lora, 451 
Mass. at 437.  These first two requirements generally would be 
difficult or impossible to prove with circumstantial evidence.  
If a defendant sought to present evidence only concerning the 
stop itself, the defendant would not be able to show that a 
broader class of persons violated the law.  Furthermore, if a 
defendant did not point to consistent patterns of conduct or 
police admissions, it usually would not be possible to show that 
the failure to enforce the traffic laws was deliberate or 
consistent. 
 
In the context of racially biased motor vehicle stops, 
purportedly to enforce traffic laws, however, these first two 
requirements are unnecessary.  As stated, because of the 
ubiquity of traffic violations, only a tiny percentage of these 
violations ultimately result in motor vehicle stops, warnings, 
or citations.  Thus, it virtually always will be the case "that 
a broader class of persons" violated the law than those against 
whom the law was enforced.  See Bernardo B., 453 Mass. at 168.  
Similarly, in stopping one vehicle but not another, an officer 
necessarily has made a deliberate choice.  In the context of a 
22 
 
 
motor vehicle stop, we therefore conclude that the first two 
requirements are not needed.  The totality of the circumstances 
test, described infra, requires only the evidence necessary to 
support a reasonable inference that the stop was based on race 
or membership in another constitutionally protected group. 
 
Additionally, in the context of traffic stops, we must 
depart from our prior interpretations of the meaning of a 
"reasonable inference," to the extent that the phrase was used 
to represent an onerous standard in other areas of selective 
enforcement law.  In King, 374 Mass. at 17, for instance, a 
female defendant argued that her arrest and prosecution for 
prostitution was based on her gender, in violation of equal 
protection principles.  Notwithstanding the arresting officer's 
testimony "that he had never arrested a male prostitute and that 
it was the policy of the Boston police department vice squad to 
arrest only female prostitutes," we held that the defendant had 
fallen "far short of establishing any evidence of a denial of 
equal protection since other criminal statutes may be employed 
to punish male conduct equivalent to female prostitution."  Id. 
at 18. 
 
Similarly, in Franklin Fruit Co., 388 Mass. at 229-230, the 
defendant supermarket claimed that the prohibition against the 
operation of a supermarket on Sundays was applied against it, 
and not others, because its owners were Greek.  Relying upon the 
23 
 
 
doctrine of selective enforcement, the judge dismissed the 
charges against the supermarket after he found that the police 
chief had refused to enforce the prohibition against the 
defendant's competitors, and had called the owner of the 
supermarket a "money hungry Greek."  Id. at 230.  Yet, this 
court reversed that decision because it concluded that there was 
"nothing in the record to indicate that citations were issued to 
[the supermarket] simply because [its owner] was of Greek 
heritage."  Id. at 234. 
 
As has been demonstrated, these holdings would set a nearly 
impossible bar for victims of discriminatory traffic stops to 
clear in order to establish their claims, whether through 
statistics or other circumstantial evidence.  See Lora, 451 
Mass. at 445 (biased policing "would not be alleviated by a 
standard that nominally allows a defendant to make claim of 
selective enforcement of traffic laws, but forecloses such a 
claim in practice").  Rather than requiring a "reasonable 
inference," these cases actually demand something much more.  
Accordingly, we conclude that our past interpretations of a 
reasonable inference do not control in the context of traffic 
stops.  While a defendant must show more than the fact that he 
or she was a member of a constitutionally protected class and 
was stopped for a traffic infraction, the burden must not be so 
heavy that it makes any remedy illusory.  The requirement that a 
24 
 
 
defendant establish a reasonable inference that a traffic stop 
was motivated by racial bias means simply that the defendant 
must produce evidence upon which a reasonable person could rely 
to infer that the officer discriminated on the basis of the 
defendant's race or membership in another protected class.  
Conclusive evidence is not needed. 
 
ii.  The revised test.  The burden shifting framework under 
Lora remains the same, even as we elaborate on the ways in which 
a defendant can present nonstatistical evidence of a race-based 
pretextual stop.  A defendant first should raise a reasonable 
inference of racial profiling through a motion to suppress.  The 
motion should describe all of the circumstances of the traffic 
stop that support a reasonable inference that the decision to 
make the stop was motivated (whether explicitly or implicitly) 
by race.  The defendant need not submit admissible evidence; 
rather, the motion simply must point to specific facts about the 
stop that support such an inference.  These facts, including 
statements by the defendant and others, may be based on the 
defendant's personal knowledge, the defendant's own 
investigation, evidence obtained during discovery, and other 
relevant sources.  If the defendant's motion establishes such an 
inference, the defendant is entitled to a hearing, at which the 
Commonwealth would bear the burden of rebutting the inference.  
Of course, a traffic stop motivated by race is unconstitutional, 
25 
 
 
even if the officer also was motivated by the legitimate purpose 
of enforcing the traffic laws. 
 
When examining the totality of the circumstances, judges 
should consider factors such as:  (1) patterns in enforcement 
actions by the particular police officer;7 (2) the regular duties 
of the officer involved in the stop;8 (3) the sequence of events 
                     
 
7 To make such a demonstration, a defendant might point to 
an officer's patterns of enforcement before and after the stop 
at issue.  It could be probative, for example, if a significant 
percentage of stops made by the officer in the preceding weeks 
or months involved drivers of the same race being stopped for 
minor traffic infractions, while those of other races were not.  
Or, if the officer repeatedly noted the same minor infraction, 
such as a failure to signal a lane change, while stopping 
drivers who shared the same protected class as the defendant.  
Such evidence need not be demonstrated to be statistically valid 
in order to support a reasonable inference. 
 
 
8 Traffic stops initiated by officers whose primary 
assignment does not involve the enforcement of traffic laws 
might warrant particular scrutiny.  For example, an officer 
working routine patrol might write many tickets as part of 
ordinary duties, as compared to an officer working a specialized 
assignment such as drug enforcement task force, hostage rescue, 
or a domestic violence unit. 
 
26 
 
 
prior to the stop;9 (4) the manner of the stop;10 (5) the safety 
interests in enforcing the motor vehicle violation;11 and (6) the 
specific police department's policies and procedures regarding 
traffic stops.12  These factors are not exhaustive; any relevant 
facts may be raised for the judge's consideration. 
                     
 
9 It could be relevant that officers observed or followed a 
vehicle for an extended period of time prior to making the stop, 
see State vs. Deleon, N.M. Ct. App., No. 30,813, slip op. at 8 
(Feb. 14, 2013) (officer followed defendant for multiple miles 
before stop); State v. Arreola, 176 Wash. 2d 284, 301 (2012) 
(Chambers, J., dissenting) ("officer noticed, after following 
the car he wished to stop for a half mile or so, that its 
exhaust system was not in compliance with traffic regulations"); 
a judge also might consider whether the circumstances would have 
allowed the officer to note the defendant's race, see State v. 
Snapp, 174 Wash. 2d 177, 199-200 (2012) (on dark night, officer 
could not see race of defendant). 
 
 
10 A judge might examine whether the officer's conduct 
during the stop was consistent with, and limited to, that 
necessary to enforce the motor vehicle violation.  See, e.g., 
People v. Roundtree, 234 A.D. 2d 612, 613 (N.Y. 1996) (court 
considered fact that officer "did not question [the driver] 
about the [traffic] infraction or issue a traffic summons").  
Cf. Commonwealth v. Cordero, 477 Mass. 237, 242 (2017) ("police 
inquiry in routine traffic stop must end upon production of 
valid license and registration" [citation omitted]). 
 
 
11 For example, where the traffic infraction clearly 
implicated significant public safety concerns, such as operating 
under the influence of alcohol, those concerns would weigh 
against drawing an inference of discriminatory intent. 
 
 
12 If an officer's actions in making the stop deviated from 
the policies and procedures of his or her department, such as a 
stop by an undercover officer where a department had a policy 
against making routine traffic stops in unmarked vehicles, the 
deviation might support an inference that the stop involved 
racial profiling. 
27 
 
 
 
A defendant has a right to reasonable discovery of evidence 
concerning the totality of the circumstances of the traffic 
stop; such discovery may include the particular officer's recent 
traffic stops and motor vehicle-based field interrogations and 
observations (FIOs).  To the extent that the relevant 
information exceeds the automatic discovery requirements of 
Mass. R. Crim. P. 14 (a) (1) (A), as amended, 444 Mass. 1501 
(2005), a defendant may seek such discovery by means of a motion 
filed pursuant to Mass. R. Crim. P. 14 (a) (2), as appearing in 
442 Mass. 1518 (2004).  See Commonwealth v. Durham, 446 Mass. 
212, 234, cert. denied, 549 U.S. 855 (2006) (Cordy, J., 
dissenting) ("Rule 14 (a) (2) gives a judge discretion to 
authorize a defendant to discover from the Commonwealth 
'relevant evidence'").  "At the discovery stage, the question is 
whether the defendant has made a threshold showing of 
relevance."  Bernardo B., 453 Mass. at 169, discussing Mass. R. 
Crim. P. 14 (a) (2).  Where relevant and material, discovery 
also would include information regarding the policies and 
procedures pertaining to the officer's unit, as well as the 
officer's typical duties and responsibilities.  Of course, this 
right to discovery applies equally to all claims of racially 
motivated stops, regardless of whether a defendant is pointing 
to the circumstances of the stop to raise a claim of 
28 
 
 
discriminatory enforcement or is presenting the type of broader 
statistics contemplated by Lora. 
 
Once a reasonable inference of racial profiling has been 
established, the Commonwealth would bear the burden of rebutting 
that inference.  See Lora, 451 Mass. at 438.  To meet its 
burden, the Commonwealth would have to do more than merely point 
to the validity of the traffic violation that was the asserted 
reason for the stop.  Rather, it would have to grapple with all 
of the reasonable inferences and all of the evidence that a 
defendant presented, and would have to prove that the stop was 
not racially motivated.  If the Commonwealth does not rebut the 
reasonable inference that the stop was motivated at least in 
part by race, the defendant would have established that the stop 
violated the equal protection principles of arts. 1 and 10, and 
therefore was illegal, and any evidence derived from the stop 
would have to be suppressed.  See id. 
 
d.  Equal protection is the appropriate constitutional 
provision.  Justice Budd would use art. 14 to address the 
affliction of racial profiling in traffic enforcement, thereby 
grafting the equal protection inquiry onto our jurisprudence on 
searches and seizures.  This court and the United States Supreme 
Court, however, consistently have held that "the constitutional 
basis for objecting to intentionally discriminatory application 
of laws is the Equal Protection Clause, not the Fourth 
29 
 
 
Amendment" to the United States Constitution or art. 14 of the 
Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.  See Lora, 451 Mass. 
at 436, quoting Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 813 
(1996). 
 
While the justices differ as to which constitutional 
principles to use as the basis of a system intended to eliminate 
racial profiling in traffic stops, both approaches share this 
common goal.  It is critical to bear in mind that a disagreement 
about the best legal analysis to use to redress the fundamental 
problem of racial bias in traffic stops is not a disagreement 
about the importance of systemic change to attempt to reach this 
goal. 
 
Justice Budd contends that the use of a "would have" test, 
based solely on a reasonable officer standard, without inquiry 
into the true motivations of the officer who conducted the stop, 
would address the evidentiary challenges inherent in 
establishing that a traffic stop was based on racial profiling.  
In her view, an analysis under equal protection is susceptible 
to manipulation, whereas an analysis under art. 14, which asks 
whether a reasonable officer would have made the stop, somehow 
magically would eliminate all concerns of police manipulation or 
lack of candor.  Similarly, in this view, analyzing a traffic 
stop under art. 14 would eliminate judicial reluctance to 
inquire into an officer's motive in making the stop whereas, for 
30 
 
 
a driver to prevail on an equal protection claim, necessarily 
requires a finding that an officer indeed was racially biased.  
But these complex and nuanced subjective inquiries are not so 
easily avoided.  Given the significant difficulties in 
discerning the characteristics of a "reasonable officer," in 
conjunction with the justified trepidation of trial judges in 
second guessing discretionary law enforcement decisions where no 
discriminatory motivation was involved, any version of the 
"would have" inquiry, regardless of whether it explicitly 
includes only an objective component, inevitably would slide 
into the subjective motivation of the officer.  A determination 
that a reasonable (nonracist) officer would not have made the 
stop may be worded more palatably, but the underlying conclusion 
is the same as a determination that a stop was in violation of 
equal protection:  a judge allowing a motion to suppress 
evidence seized after both stops has inquired, however 
obliquely, into the officer's intent, and has determined that 
the stop was motivated by racial bias. 
 
That the examination of subjective motives is essentially 
unavoidable under the "would have" test, and therefore also 
subject to the "fraught" judicial inquiry into subjective 
intent, and potential manipulation by law enforcement, is 
illustrated by the ways in which the test has been used in 
practice.  That it has not, in fact, accomplished its goal of 
31 
 
 
removing officer intent and implicit bias from a reviewing 
judge's decision-making process suggests that in Massachusetts, 
too, the "would have" test will not be the magic wand that 
Justice Budd anticipates.  A review of its history in 
instructive. 
 
In 1995, the United States Supreme Court rejected the 
"would have" test and declared that a motor vehicle stop based 
on probable cause that a traffic violation had occurred complies 
with the Fourth Amendment, regardless of any ulterior motives 
for the stop.  See Whren, 517 U.S. at 813, 816-819.  In 
subsequent years, forty-seven States have followed the Court in 
rejecting the "would have" test.13 
                     
 
13 See Commonwealth v. Buckley, 478 Mass. 861, 870 (2018); 
State v. Williams, 249 So.3d 527, 532–533 (Ala. Crim. App. 
2017); Hamilton v. State, 59 P.3d 760, 765–766 (Alaska Ct. App. 
2002), cert. denied, 540 U.S. 915 (2003); Jones v. Sterling, 210 
Ariz. 308, 311 (2005); State v. Mancia-Sandoval, 361 S.W.3d 835, 
839 (Ark. 2010); People v. Woods, 21 Cal. 4th 668, 680 (1999), 
cert. denied, 529 U.S. 1023 (2000); People v. Rodriguez, 945 
P.2d 1351, 1359–1360 (Colo. 1997); State v. Jones, 113 Conn. 
App. 250, 265 (2009) (noting Federal rule and declining to 
address under State Constitution); Dobrin v. Florida Dep't of 
Highway Safety & Motor Vehicles, 874 So. 2d 1171, 1173 (Fla.), 
cert. denied, 543 U.S. 957 (2004); State v. Holler, 224 Ga. App. 
66, 70 (1996); State v. Bolosan, 78 Haw. 86, 94 (1995); State v. 
Myers, 118 Idaho 608, 610 (Ct. App. 1990); People v. Gray, 305 
Ill. App. 3d 835, 839 (1999); Mitchell v. State, 745 N.E.2d 775, 
787 (Ind. 2001); Brown, 930 N.W.2d at 848-855, and cases cited; 
State v. Hardyway, 264 Kan. 451, 456 (1998); Moberly v. 
Commonwealth, 551 S.W.3d 26, 29 (Ky. 2018), reh'g denied (Aug. 
16, 2018); State v. Waters, 780 So. 2d 1053, 1056 (La. 2001); 
State v. Bolduc, 722 A.2d 44, 45 (Me. 1998); Thornton v. State, 
465 Md. 122, 135 (2019); People v. Labelle, 478 Mich. 891, 891 
32 
 
 
 
New Mexico and Washington, the only two States to have 
adopted the "would have" test post-Whren, explicitly have 
included the subjective motivations of the officer conducting 
the stop as part of their version of the test.14  See State v. 
Gonzales, 257 P.3d 894, 898 (N.M. 2011) (question is whether, 
based on totality of circumstances, "the officer who made the 
stop would have done so even without the unrelated motive"); 
Ladson, 138 Wash. 2d at 358–359 ("When determining whether a 
                     
(2007), overruled on other grounds by People v. Mead, 503 Mich. 
205 (2019); State v. George, 557 N.W.2d 575, 578-579 (Minn. 
1997); Martin v. State, 240 So. 3d 1047, 1051–1052 (Miss. 2017), 
cert. denied, 138 S. Ct. 2592 (2018); State v. Smith, 595 S.W.3d 
143, 145-146 (Mo. 2020); Brunette v. State, 383 Mont. 458, 465 
(2016); State v. Draganescu, 276 Neb. 448, 460–461 (2008); Doyle 
v. State, 116 Nev. 148, 155 (2000); State v. McBreairty, 142 
N.H. 12, 15 (1997); State v. Bacome, 228 N.J. 94, 103 (2017); 
People v. Robinson, 97 N.Y.2d 341, 349 (2001); State v. 
McClendon, 350 N.C. 630, 635–636 (1999); State v. Bartelson, 704 
N.W.2d 824, 827-828 (N.D. 2005); Dayton v. Erickson, 76 Ohio St. 
3d 3, 11 (1996); Lozoya v. State, 932 P.2d 22, 32 (Okla. Crim. 
App. 1996); State v. Olaiz, 100 Or. App. 380, 386-387 (1990); 
Commonwealth v. Chase, 599 Pa. 80, 102 (2008); State v. Bjerke, 
697 A.2d 1069, 1073 (R.I. 1997); Milledge v. State, 422 S.C. 
366, 375 (2018); State v. Sleep, 590 N.W.2d 235, 237-238 (S.D. 
1999); State v. Donaldson, 380 S.W.3d 86, 92 (Tenn. 2012); 
Holder v. State, 595 S.W.3d 691, 698 (Tex. Crim. App. 2020); 
State v. Lopez, 873 P.2d 1127, 1134-1135 (Utah 1994); State v. 
Trudeau, 165 Vt. 355, 359 n.3 (1996); Thomas v. Commonwealth, 57 
Va. App. 267, 273-274 (2010); Miller v. Chenoweth, 229 W. Va. 
114, 120 (2012); State v. Houghton, 364 Wis. 2d 234, 250 (2015); 
Fertig v. State, 146 P.3d 492, 501 (Wyo. 2006). 
 
 
14 Delaware has left the question unresolved, with one trial 
court decision applying the test and others rejecting it.  See 
Turner v. State, 25 A.3d 774, 777 (Del. 2011), citing State v. 
Heath, 929 A.2d 390 (Del. Super. Ct. 2006). 
 
33 
 
 
given stop is pretextual, the court should consider the totality 
of the circumstances, including both the subjective intent of 
the officer as well as the objective reasonableness of the 
officer's behavior." 
 
Under these tests, courts have focused on whether the 
circumstantial evidence was sufficient to establish that the 
officer had the requisite subjective motive.15  See, e.g., 
Schuster v. State Dep't of Taxation & Revenue, Motor Vehicle 
Div., 283 P.3d 288, 298 (N.M. 2012) (approaching motorcycle 
operator whose motorcycle had fallen to ground was not pretext 
because motive was community caretaking); State vs. Deleon, N.M. 
Ct. App., No. 30,813, slip op. at 6-8 (Feb. 14, 2013) (wide turn 
violation was pretext for investigation of driving under 
influence of alcohol, where pattern was established by six 
witnesses who testified that they had been pulled over for minor 
                     
 
15 Moreover, Washington has deemed constitutional certain 
"mixed-motive" stops, in which an officer was motivated both by 
the need to address the traffic violation and by a desire to 
investigate other suspected criminal activity.  In these cases, 
Washington courts delve even further into the subjective 
motivations of the officer, and will consider a stop permissible 
if the officer "ma[de] an independent and conscious 
determination that a traffic stop to address a suspected traffic 
infraction [was] reasonably necessary in furtherance of traffic 
safety and the general welfare."  See Arreola, 176 Wash. 2d 
at 298–299.  Of course, under equal protection principles, a 
traffic stop motivated by race is unconstitutional even if the 
officer also is motivated by the legitimate purpose of enforcing 
traffic laws. 
34 
 
 
violations in previous months after leaving same bar, asked 
about drinking, and released without traffic citation); State v. 
Jones, 163 Wash. App. 354, 363 (2011) (stop for failure to use 
seat belt was not pretext, where officer cited defendant for 
infraction); State v. Montes-Malindas, 144 Wash. App. 254, 262 
(2008) (stop of driver who turned on headlights one hundred 
yards after starting to drive, conducted by officer who was not 
on traffic patrol, was pretext).16  These inquiries are quite 
similar to the inquiry described, supra, under a selective 
prosecution analysis. 
 
A move to art. 14 would confuse this inquiry, because our 
jurisprudence on search and seizure provides no guidance 
regarding which officer motivations render unreasonable an 
otherwise permissible traffic stop.  Our equal protection 
jurisprudence, by contrast, provides clear guidelines.  A 
governmental action based on membership in a suspect class, 
including "sex, race, color, creed, or national origin," is 
unconstitutional unless the action survives strict scrutiny.  
                     
 
16 See also State v. Scharff, 284 P.3d 447, 451 (N.M. Ct. 
App. 2012); State vs. Shindledecker, N.M. Ct. App., No. 34,442, 
slip op. at 5 (Aug. 11, 2016); State vs. Gonzales, N.M. Ct. 
App., No. 30,188, slip op. (May 1, 2012); State vs. Dominguez, 
N.M. Ct. App., No. 29,741, slip op. at 5 (Oct. 20, 2010); State 
v. Wright, 155 Wash. App. 537, 559 (2010), reversed on other 
grounds sub nom. State v. Snapp, 174 Wash. 2d 177 (2012); State 
v. Nichols, 161 Wash. 2d 1, 11-12 (2007); State v. Myers, 117 
Wash. App. 93, 96-98 (2003); State v. DeSantiago, 97 Wash. App. 
446, 452 (1999). 
35 
 
 
See Finch v. Commonwealth Health Ins. Connector Auth., 459 Mass. 
655, 662 (2011), S.C., 461 Mass. 232 (2012), quoting King, 374 
Mass. at 21.  Thus, unlike art. 14, our equal protection 
doctrine provides a clear definition of an unlawful traffic 
stop:  any stop based on a suspect classification. 
 
In practice, the additional methods of establishing racial 
profiling that the court adopts today, and the "would have" test 
that Justice Budd propounds, often could look similar at a 
hearing on a motion to suppress.  In some situations, however, 
the "would have" test might not be effective where an analysis 
under equal protection would.  By focusing on what a reasonable 
officer would have done in those particular circumstances, for 
example, and disregarding any overt discussion of intent, the 
"would have" test would conclude that a stop for driving twenty 
miles per hour over the speed limit in a residential 
neighborhood was reasonable to protect public safety, and would 
not take into account that the traffic enforcement officer 
making the stop largely was stopping Black drivers.  Similarly, 
if an officer targeted intensive traffic enforcement efforts 
only at neighborhoods where most residents are people of color, 
motor vehicle stops such as for running red lights or stop signs 
would be reasonable under the "would have" test to protect 
pedestrians and other vehicles.  Yet, under an equal protection 
analysis, the municipality-wide statistics that will be 
36 
 
 
available for all municipalities in the Commonwealth on an 
ongoing basis, as a result of a 2019 statute, see G. L. c. 90, 
§ 63, inserted by St. 2019, c. 122, § 10, and part 3.f., infra, 
could be used to support a reasonable inference that the stops 
unfairly targeted communities of color, and were made due to 
racial bias. 
 
In sum, the deficiency in our response to race-based 
traffic enforcement has not been the basic principles of equal 
protection, but, rather, the burdens we have placed on 
defendants to establish their claims.  The way to address that 
issue, as we do today, is to modify the ways in which claims of 
racial profiling can be demonstrated, and not to change the 
constitutional protection under which claims are analyzed. 
 
e.  The defendant's evidence in this case.  Even as we 
create new methods that defendants may use to establish a 
reasonable inference of discrimination in traffic stops, we 
recognize that statistical evidence, if available, has unique 
advantages for reaching the thorny question of intent, 
particularly when implicit bias is at issue.  This is so 
regardless of whether the officers' actions are analyzed under 
an equal protection framework or under art. 14.  In terms of 
systemic change, statistics provide potentially the strongest 
tool to demonstrate that bias, particularly where it is 
implicit; indeed, the many journal articles relied upon by the 
37 
 
 
concurrence derive their power from presenting staggering 
inequity in numbers. 
 
There generally are two components to the statistical data 
that defendants have used to establish a reasonable inference 
that the decision to conduct the traffic stop was motivated by 
race:  (1) information about how the statute was enforced 
against other drivers of the defendant's race by the officers or 
department in question, often involving numbers of stops, 
citations, and FIOs for drivers of specific races (enforcement 
data); and (2) statistical data that estimate the demographic 
distribution of drivers on the roads in the area of the stop 
(benchmark data).  The two are then compared, under the 
assumption that, absent impermissible discrimination, the 
enforcement rates should reflect the demographic composition of 
all drivers.  See Lora, 451 Mass. at 442.  More specifically, in 
this case, the percentage of citations and FIOs involving Black 
drivers should have been similar to the estimated percentage of 
Black drivers on the road in the area of the stop. 
 
In support of his claim, the defendant obtained FIO reports 
issued by the officers who stopped him, for a period spanning 
from January 1, 2011, to November 28, 2017, the day of the stop; 
he also obtained citation data from December 14, 2011, to 
November 11, 2017.  The defendant then engaged a statistical 
expert to compare the citations and FIO reports involving motor 
38 
 
 
vehicle stops to the population of drivers on the road on which 
the defendant was stopped, that is, the "benchmark" population.  
The expert estimated the demographics of the benchmark 
population based on data from the 2010 United States Census 
concerning "census blocks" -- geographical subunits containing 
from 600 to 3,000 people -- for areas in which these officers 
either had issued a citation or had reported a motor vehicle-
related FIO.  Because the population of motorists on these 
largely residential roads may include motorists who reside in 
areas outside the pertinent census blocks, the expert also 
estimated the demographics of benchmark populations in 
additional census blocks within 300 feet, 600 feet, and 1,000 
feet of an FIO or citation.  Ultimately, the expert concluded 
that the officers in this case were significantly more likely to 
conduct an FIO of a driver based on a motor vehicle infraction 
if the driver was Black than if the driver was not Black.17  She 
                     
17 Of the total number of the officers' vehicle-related 
field investigation and observation (FIO) reports, 80.62 percent 
involved Black drivers, as compared to a benchmark population of 
the census blocks containing those stops in which 44.67 percent 
of residents were Black.  The benchmark estimate that 44.67 
percent of motorists on these roads were Black likely was an 
overestimate of the percentage of Black motorists on them, given 
that the proportion of Black residents was lower in all of the 
surrounding areas and municipalities.  Nonetheless, the expert 
concluded that even if 77 percent of the actual motorists were 
Black, there was still a statistically significant probability 
that Black drivers were more likely to be the subject of an FIO 
than other drivers. 
39 
 
 
also concluded that there was strong statistical evidence that 
the officers issued citations to Black drivers in Boston at 
rates consistent with racial profiling.18 
 
The judge, however, found that this evidence did not 
satisfy the defendant's initial burden to raise a reasonable 
inference of discrimination under Lora.  Although the judge 
recognized that it was unclear whether the data that he 
concluded were necessary even existed, he reasoned that the FIO 
and citation data presented were unreliable because not every 
traffic stop results in the production of an FIO report or the 
issuance of a citation.19  As the available data did not reflect 
                     
 
18 Of all the traffic citations the officers issued in 
Boston, 56.59 percent were issued to Black drivers.  The expert 
compared this to a benchmark population for all of Boston, in 
which, in 2010, 24.38 percent of residents were Black.  In the 
absence of racial profiling, the odds of this disparity in 
citations occurring randomly is less than one in 100,000.  
According to the expert's analysis, this data would support a 
statistically significant inference of discrimination in 
citations even if fifty percent of the drivers in Boston were 
Black. 
 
19 In 2005, certain police departments, including the Boston 
police department, were required to collect data on "all traffic 
stops, including those not resulting in a warning, citation or 
arrest," for a period of one year after an initial review of 
citation data suggested they had engaged in racial or gender 
profiling.  See St. 2000, c. 228, § 10; Boston Police 
Patrolmen's Ass'n, Inc. v. Police Dep't of Boston, 446 Mass. 46, 
48 (2006) ("249 of 366 Massachusetts law enforcement agencies 
appeared to have engaged in racial or gender profiling").  This 
case, however, arose more than a decade after the end of the 
statutory mandate to collect this "all stops" data.  It appears 
that no such data were available for the relevant time period 
and the particular officers who stopped the defendant. 
40 
 
 
the "larger, unknown total number of motor vehicle stops," the 
judge found that it "f[e]ll well short" of the data analyzed in 
State v. Soto, 324 N.J. Super. 66 (1996), a New Jersey case we 
cited approvingly in Lora, 451 Mass. at 440-441, where the 
defendants had access to a police database of all stops made on 
the relevant roadway.  See Soto, supra at 69.  The judge also 
concluded that, as compared to the observational data presented 
in Soto, the census data here were an unreliable benchmark for 
the demographics of motorists on the roads patrolled by the 
officers without some "independent verification" that the data 
were reflective of the population of relevant motorists.  See 
Lora, 451 Mass. at 444. 
 
The judge erred in discounting both aspects of the 
defendant's data.  With regard to benchmark data, Lora, 
451 Mass. at 443-444, does not stand for the categorical rule 
that census data is never an appropriate proxy for the actual 
population of motorists on the relevant roadway.  In Lora, 
supra, we concluded that it was inappropriate to use census data 
from the town of Auburn as a benchmark for the demographics of 
drivers passing through Auburn on a major interstate highway; we 
noted that, of the fifty-two motorists ticketed by the officer 
in question on that stretch of highway, ninety percent were not 
residents of Auburn.  Here, where the relevant roadways are 
urban residential roads, as opposed to an interstate highway, we 
41 
 
 
have much greater confidence in the accuracy of residential 
demographics from United States Census data as representative of 
those making use of the residential roads.  Moreover, in this 
case, the defendant's expert statistician took pains to account 
in sophisticated ways for the possible presence of nonresident 
drivers.  This benchmarking data was more than sufficiently 
reliable to support a claim of selective enforcement and racial 
discrimination in making the traffic stop, under the defendant's 
then-existing burden.  The judge abused his discretion in 
rejecting it as insufficient. 
 
The same is the case with respect to the defendant's use of 
data on citations and motor vehicle stop-generated FIOs.  If, as 
here, the data on the officers' citations and motor vehicle FIOs 
show that these interactions are racially skewed, it is a 
reasonable inference that the rate at which those officers' 
stops of drivers of a particular race is similarly 
disproportionate to stops of other drivers.  In declining to 
take this inferential step, the judge erred.  His insistence 
that this inference had to be all but unescapable, and not 
merely reasonable, was an abuse of discretion. 
 
In support of his motion to suppress, the defendant 
submitted the expert's statistical analysis, which established a 
reasonable inference of impermissible discrimination.  Having 
made this implicit determination, the judge properly decided to 
42 
 
 
conduct an evidentiary hearing, where the burden was on the 
Commonwealth to rebut the reasonable inference established by 
the defendant.  See Lora, 451 Mass. at 438.  The Commonwealth 
offered the testimony of the arresting officers, who testified 
that they did not conduct the stop due to the defendant's race.  
Because implicit bias may lead an officer to make race-based 
traffic stops without conscious awareness of having done so, 
such a simple denial is insufficient to rebut the reasonable 
inference.  See Commonwealth v. McCowen, 458 Mass. 461, 499 
(2010) (Ireland, J., concurring) ("people possess [implicit 
racial biases] over which they have little or no conscious, 
intentional control" [citation omitted]); Givelber, The 
Application of Equal Protection Principles to Selective 
Enforcement of the Criminal Law, 1973 U. Ill. L.F. 88, 114 
(1973) (where "there is no legitimate justification for a given 
instance of selective enforcement, then the unjust treatment by 
the prosecutor should violate the equal protection clause 
regardless of whether the prosecutor knew he was abusing his 
office"). 
 
The Commonwealth did not call an expert or present any 
statistical evidence.  As discussed, supra, the prosecutor's 
primary argument was that analyses based on FIOs and United 
States Census tracts were unreliable.  Additionally, the 
Commonwealth argued that Black drivers were overrepresented in 
43 
 
 
the statistical data because Black individuals commit more 
crimes.  "[W]e are unaware of any reliable study establishing 
that motor vehicle violations are more frequently committed by 
any particular race of driver."  Lora, 451 Mass. at 442 n.30, 
citing Soto, 324 N.J. Super. at 74.  Thus, the Commonwealth 
clearly failed to rebut the reasonable inference of 
impermissible discrimination raised by the defendant, and the 
denial of the motion to suppress must be reversed.20 
 
f.  The potential for widely available statistics.  In 
2019, the Legislature enacted G. L. c. 90, § 63, see St. 2019, 
c. 122, § 10, which requires, on an ongoing basis, an annual 
report of consolidated traffic stop data by town, and 
consolidation of that data to the registry of motor vehicles.  A 
bill currently under consideration by the Legislature would 
repeal G. L. c. 90, § 63, and instead would require law 
enforcement officers to collect more comprehensive data on each 
traffic stop they make, such that data by officer would be 
available to the municipality as well as the registry of motor 
vehicles.  See 2020 Senate Doc. No. 2820, § 52.  This bill would 
require all officers, not only those in police departments found 
to have engaged in racial profiling, to record information on 
                     
 
20 Because of this conclusion, we need not reach the 
defendant's contention that the subsequent inventory search was 
unconstitutional. 
44 
 
 
any traffic stop (not just those resulting in an issued 
citation), including the reason for the stop and the age, race, 
ethnicity, and gender of the individual stopped, among other 
information.  See 2020 Senate Doc. No. 2820, § 52 (d) (1).  
Further, the bill would require each municipal law enforcement 
department semiannually to publish a statistical analysis of the 
department's stop and search data.  See 2020 Senate Doc. No. 
2820, § 52 (d) (5).  If enacted, the bill likely would enable 
defendants to access publicly available, department-wide data on 
the demographics of all traffic stops, by officer, in the 
relevant municipality, and would provide a plethora of relevant 
data available to support (or weaken) equal protection claims.  
The House of Representatives, however, recently passed a revised 
version of the bill that completely omits the provisions 
requiring collection of data on traffic stops.  See 2020 House 
Doc. No. 4860. 
 
We urge the Legislature to require the collection and 
analysis of officer-specific data, such as set forth in 2020 
Senate Doc. No. 2820.  This type of data collection would help 
protect drivers from racially discriminatory traffic stops, and 
also would protect police officers who do not engage in such 
discriminatory stops. 
 
4.  Conclusion.  The matter is remanded to the county 
court, where an order shall issue reversing the Superior Court 
45 
 
 
judge's order denying the defendant's motion to suppress, and 
remanding the matter to the Superior Court for such other 
proceedings as are necessary, consistent with this decision. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
So ordered. 
 
 
 
GANTS, C.J. (concurring).  I agree with the court that a 
motor vehicle stop motivated to any extent by the race of the 
driver or passenger (or by the driver's or passenger's 
membership in any suspect class) violates our guarantee of equal 
protection under arts. 1 and 10 of the Massachusetts Declaration 
of Rights, and that the fruits of any such unconstitutional stop 
must be suppressed.  See ante at    .  I also agree with the 
court that a reasonable inference of racial profiling does not 
require statistical evidence but may instead be based on the 
totality of evidence surrounding the stop.  See ante at    . 
 
I agree with Justice Budd's concurrence that a motor 
vehicle stop that is found unconstitutional as a violation of 
equal protection would also be an unreasonable stop in violation 
of art. 14 of our Declaration of Rights.  See post at    .  
Specifically, I agree that a stop that is motivated by the race 
of the driver is not constitutionally reasonable.  I note that, 
despite our authorization rule, we have long considered the 
motivation of the law enforcement officer who conducts a search 
where it is claimed to be an inventory or administrative search; 
if the officer's motivation is investigative and the search is 
not lawful as an investigative search, the search is 
unconstitutional and the fruits of the search are suppressed.  
See Commonwealth v. Rostad, 410 Mass. 618, 620 (1991) (inventory 
search "may not be allowed to become a cover or pretext for an 
2 
 
 
investigative search"); Commonwealth v. Eagleton, 402 Mass. 199, 
207 n.13 (1988) ("An administrative search may not be used as a 
subterfuge to avoid the burden of establishing probable cause to 
support a criminal investigative search").  These cases 
demonstrate that courts can, and do, successfully explore the 
true motivation of an officer in examining the lawfulness of a 
search. 
 
I do not join Justice Budd's concurrence because I would 
not declare in this case that any pretextual motor vehicle stop, 
even where the pretext is not based on the membership of the 
driver or passenger in a suspect class, is also a violation of 
art. 14.  See post at    .  Here, the only claim of pretext is 
based on the race of the driver; we need not decide in this case 
whether to extend the reach of our opinion to apply to all 
pretexts. 
 
In closing, I note that, despite our jurisprudential 
differences reflected in the various opinions in this case, the 
court is unanimous in concluding that a motor vehicle stop that 
arises from racial profiling is unconstitutional, that the 
burden placed on defendants in criminal cases to establish an 
inference of racial profiling need not be based on statistical 
evidence, that the burden may be met by inferences arising from 
the totality of the evidence of the stop, and that the burden 
should not be so high that a remedy is, in practice, mostly 
3 
 
 
illusory.  In short, it is the unanimous view of this court that 
the prohibition against racial profiling must be given teeth and 
that judges should suppress evidence where a motor vehicle stop 
is motivated, even in part, by the race of the driver or 
passenger. 
 
 
BUDD, J. (concurring, with whom Lenk, J., joins).  Racial 
profiling in traffic stops has proven to be an intractable 
problem, the devastating consequences of which members of this 
court have recognized for many years.  See Commonwealth v. 
Buckley, 478 Mass. 861, 871 (2018); id. at 876 (Budd, J., 
concurring); Commonwealth v. Lora, 451 Mass. 425, 449 (2008) 
(Ireland, J., concurring); Commonwealth v. Feyenord, 445 Mass. 
72, 88 (2005) (Greaney, J., concurring), cert. denied, 546 U.S. 
1187 (2006); Commonwealth v. Gonsalves, 429 Mass. 658, 670 
(1999) (Ireland, J., concurring).  Today, the court expressly 
acknowledges that discriminatory motor vehicle stops are 
profoundly harmful to persons and communities of color, and 
adjusts our existing equal protection framework for addressing 
such stops. 
I agree that the statistical evidence provided by this 
defendant was more than sufficient to show that the traffic stop 
was racially motivated under the requirements set forth in Lora, 
supra at 436-438.  I also agree that Lora inadvertently set the 
bar too high for defendants to meet their initial burden of 
raising an inference of racial discrimination.  However, the 
problem of racially discriminatory motor vehicle stops is a 
systemic product of the criminal justice system as it currently 
functions -- it thus requires a systemic solution. 
2 
 
 
In looking at the issue more broadly, it is clear that the 
root of the problem is pretextual stops, which allow police to 
utilize traffic stops as a means to act on hunches that are 
unsupported by reasonable suspicion and often based on the race 
of the driver.  I conclude that pretextual stops are 
unconstitutional under art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration 
of Rights1 because they allow for the investigatory stop of an 
individual without reasonable suspicion of the crime sought to 
be investigated.  For that reason, I would prohibit all 
pretextual stops.2 
                     
1 Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights 
states in pertinent part:  "Every subject has a right to be 
secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures, of his 
person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions." 
 
2 The defendant has not challenged the stop under art. 14; 
however, as we declined to evaluate the art. 14 standard for 
determining reasonableness of a motor vehicle stop (i.e., the 
authorization test) less than two years ago in Commonwealth v. 
Buckley, 478 Mass. 861, 866 (2018), it is understandable that 
the defendant here did not raise what reasonably might have 
appeared to be a futile argument.  See generally Commonwealth v. 
Vasquez, 456 Mass. 350, 358-359 (2010).  In any case, the 
constitutionality of pretextual stops was well and fully briefed 
by both parties and by amici in Buckley.  The fundamental points 
I raise today were laid out before us then, together with 
citations to dozens of studies, law review articles, and 
statistical reports relating to racial profiling in traffic 
stops and pretextual stops.  See, e.g., Harris, The Stories, the 
Statistics, and the Law:  Why "Driving While Black" Matters, 84 
Minn. L. Rev. 265, 273-274 (1999); Sklansky, Traffic Stops, 
Minority Motorists, and the Fourth Amendment, 1997 Sup. Ct. Rev. 
271, 312-316 (1997); Davis, Race, Cops, and Traffic Stops, 51 U. 
Miami L. Rev. 425, 432 (1997). 
 
3 
 
 
The court seeks to solve the problem of race-based traffic 
stops by improving upon the traditional equal protection 
analysis.  However, the ability to challenge alleged race-based 
stops on both equal protection and art. 14 grounds would enhance 
the ability of people of color to pursue an effective remedy 
against discrimination.  That is, I fear that the efficacy of 
the equal protection test remains blunted by the ability of 
police to use pretextual stops to disguise stops based on racial 
bias.  The long, difficult history of racial discrimination in 
law enforcement demonstrates that, without more, making it 
easier for defendants to raise an inference that race was the 
basis for their stops in discrete cases will not be enough to 
dismantle the practice of racial profiling.  Acknowledging the 
unconstitutionality of pretextual stops has the added systemic 
benefit of removing, in the first instance, the means by which 
racial profiling is accomplished. 
1.  Pretext and the systemic problem of racially motivated 
motor vehicle stops.  Under the authorization test, a traffic 
stop is valid "so long as the police are doing no more than they 
                     
As is obvious from this concurrence, since Buckley was 
decided I have changed my view that it is "unworkable" to shift 
our jurisprudence away from the authorization test announced in 
Commonwealth v. Santana, 420 Mass. 205, 208-209 (1995).  
Buckley, 478 Mass. at 876 (Budd, J., concurring).  See 
Commonwealth v. Larose, 483 Mass. 323, 336 (2019) (Lenk, J., 
concurring). 
4 
 
 
are legally permitted and objectively authorized to do."  
Buckley, 478 Mass. at 865, quoting Commonwealth v. Santana, 420 
Mass. 205, 209 (1995).3  In practice, this means that an officer 
is permitted to stop a vehicle so long as he or she has observed 
a motor vehicle violation (or otherwise has either probable 
cause or reasonable suspicion to believe that one was 
committed).  See Commonwealth v. Rodriguez, 472 Mass. 767, 774 
(2015).  The authorization test therefore permits police to 
perform pretextual motor vehicle stops, i.e., stops ostensibly 
made on the basis of a motor vehicle violation, but actually 
made for the purpose of investigating suspicions of unrelated 
criminal activity.  See State v. Ladson, 138 Wash. 2d 343, 349 
(1999) ("[T]he essence of [a] pretextual traffic stop is that 
the police are pulling over a citizen, not to enforce the 
traffic code, but to conduct a criminal investigation unrelated 
to the driving.  Therefore the reasonable articulable suspicion 
that a traffic infraction has occurred which justifies an 
exception to the warrant requirement for an ordinary traffic 
stop does not justify a stop for criminal investigation"). 
                     
3 As discussed in more detail infra, this is the same 
approach that the United States Supreme Court adopted with 
regard to the Fourth Amendment to the United States 
Constitution.  See Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 813 
(1996). 
5 
 
 
 
"[D]riving is an indispensable part of modern life."  
Commonwealth v. McCarthy, 484 Mass. 493, 507 (2020).  In 
addition, our traffic code is comprehensive and detailed.4  As a 
result, "[v]ery few drivers can traverse any appreciable 
distance without violating some traffic regulation" (quotation 
and citation omitted).  LaFave, The "Routine Traffic Stop" from 
Start to Finish:  Too Much "Routine," Not Enough Fourth 
Amendment, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 1843, 1853 (2004).  See Caldwell v. 
State, 780 A.2d 1037, 1048 n.25 (Del. 2001), quoting Whitehead 
v. State, 116 Md. App. 497, 507 n.4 (1997) ("studies conducted 
on a stretch of Interstate 95 between Baltimore and Delaware 
revealed that 93% of all drivers committed some type of traffic 
violation").  See also Caldwell, supra, citing Harris, Whren v. 
United States:  Pretextual Traffic Stops and "Driving While 
Black," The Champion (March 1997), at 41; State v. Soto, 324 
N.J. Super. 66, 70 (1996) (observational study over four days on 
three-exit stretch of New Jersey turnpike showed 98.1 percent of 
2,096 observed vehicles exceeded speed limit). 
                     
 
4 Our traffic code regulates nearly every aspect of 
operating a motor vehicle, from obvious moving violations such 
as speeding and failing to stop at red lights, see G. L. c. 90, 
§ 17; G. L. c. 89, § 9, to less conspicuous moving violations 
such as failing to come to a full stop at a stop sign, see G. L. 
c. 89, § 9, or crossing marked lanes, see G. L. c. 89, § 4A, and 
subtle equipment deficiencies including window tint, lights, and 
passenger restraints, see G. L. c. 90, §§ 7, 7AA, 9D, 13A. 
6 
 
 
 
Pretextual stops are an attractive investigatory technique 
because a traffic stop can lead to a multitude of additional 
investigatory actions.  See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Goncalves-
Mendez, 484 Mass. 80, 81 (2020) (traffic stop led to discovery 
of bench warrant, arrest, impoundment, and inventory search); 
Commonwealth v. Amado, 474 Mass. 147, 150 (2016) (exit order and 
patfrisk during traffic stop).  See also Carbado, From Stopping 
Black People to Killing Black People:  The Fourth Amendment 
Pathways to Police Violence, 105 Cal. L. Rev. 125, 151 (2017) 
(Carbado) (describing "the ways in which traffic stops function 
as gateways to more intrusive searches and seizures").  Thus, 
law enforcement officers have powerful incentives to use traffic 
violations as a pretext to conduct investigatory stops. 
 
It is no secret that this combination of factors has 
allowed racially motivated motor vehicle stops to flourish.  
See, e.g., Carbado, supra at 129, 152 (describing "de facto 
legalization" of racial profiling via cases "in which Fourth 
Amendment law turns a blind eye to racial profiling or makes it 
easy for the police to get away with the practice," including 
Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 [1996]); Capers, Rethinking 
the Fourth Amendment:  Race, Citizenship, and the Equality 
Principle, 46 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 1, 34 (2011) (Capers) 
("Given that drivers routinely violate traffic laws . . . 
[Whren] virtually gives officers carte blanche to engage in 
7 
 
 
race-based pretextual stops.  And if the driving while [B]lack 
statistics . . . show anything, this is what officers do"); 
Johnson, How Racial Profiling in America Became the Law of the 
Land:  United States v. Brignoni-Ponce and Whren v. United 
States and the Need for Truly Rebellious Lawyering, 98 Geo. L.J. 
1005, 1069 (2010) (summarizing critiques of Whren); Glasser, 
American Drug Laws:  The New Jim Crow, 63 Alb. L. Rev. 703, 708 
(2000) ("We are talking about a national policy which is 
training police all over this country to use traffic violations, 
which everyone commits the minute you get into your car, as an 
excuse to stop and search people with dark skin"). 
If "systemic racism" is defined as a "system[ or] 
institution[] that produce[s] racially disparate outcomes, 
regardless of the intentions of the people who work within 
[it]," then our criminal justice system is rife with it.  See 
There's Overwhelming Evidence That the Criminal Justice System 
is Racist.  Here's the Proof, Washington Post, June 10, 2020, 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions 
/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/ 
[https://perma.cc/8YLM-KWSY].  As applicable here, allowing 
ostensibly routine traffic stops produces racially disparate 
outcomes.  In order adequately to address this systemic problem, 
we must take a clear-eyed look at pretextual stops. 
8 
 
 
2.  The unconstitutionality of pretextual stops.  The 
requirement that government searches or seizures require a 
warrant supported by probable cause is the touchstone of art. 
14's protection against arbitrary searches and seizures.  See 
Commonwealth v. Bostock, 450 Mass. 616, 623–624 (2008), quoting 
Commonwealth v. Cast, 407 Mass. 891, 901 (1990) ("It is a 
cardinal principle that searches conducted outside the judicial 
process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per 
se unreasonable [under both the Fourth Amendment to the United 
States Constitution and art. 14] -- subject only to a few 
specifically established and well-delineated exceptions" 
[quotations omitted]).  See also Commonwealth v. Antobenedetto, 
366 Mass. 51, 57 (1974) ("under the Fourth Amendment searches 
conducted without valid warrants are presumed in the first 
instance to be unreasonable.  It is then up to the government to 
show that a particular search falls within a narrow class of 
permissible exceptions"). 
The various exceptions to the warrant requirement, and the 
exceptions to those exceptions, make up our search and seizure 
jurisprudence.  We carefully scrutinize warrantless actions 
taken by law enforcement, recognizing that, where the power of 
police to conduct warrantless searches or seizures is "too 
permeating," it necessarily is "too susceptible to being 
exercised arbitrarily by law enforcement -- precisely the type 
9 
 
 
of governmental conduct against which the framers sought to 
guard" (quotations and citation omitted).  Commonwealth v. 
Almonor, 482 Mass. 35, 47 (2019). 
Although a motor vehicle stop constitutes a seizure for the 
purposes of art. 14, we have held that an investigatory stop of 
a vehicle, like a Terry-type stop of a pedestrian, does not 
require a warrant because it is by its nature a threshold, on-
the-spot inquiry that is less intrusive than an arrest.  See 
Commonwealth v. Willis, 415 Mass. 814, 818 (1993); Commonwealth 
v. Bacon, 381 Mass. 642, 643 (1980).  See generally Terry v. 
Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 20 (1968).  Motorists nevertheless are 
ostensibly protected from unreasonable searches and seizures 
because, ordinarily, to pass constitutional muster under art. 14 
a warrantless investigatory stop (seizure) of a motor vehicle 
and its occupants requires "reasonable suspicion, based on 
specific, articulable facts and inferences therefrom, that an 
occupant . . . had committed, was committing, or was about to 
commit a crime" (citation omitted).  Commonwealth v. Manha, 479 
Mass. 44, 46 (2018).  However, the authorization test strips 
away that protection because it substitutes reasonable suspicion 
of a traffic violation for reasonable suspicion of the separate 
10 
 
 
criminal conduct that the officer seeks to investigate.5  That 
is, as discussed supra, the rule permits officers to make an 
investigatory stop without the reasonable suspicion normally 
required as long as they have observed a traffic violation that 
can be used as pretext for the stop. 
In practice, if an officer wants to investigate a hunch 
about suspected criminal activity in connection with a 
particular motor vehicle, he or she has two options.  If the 
officer has reasonable suspicion of the suspected criminal 
activity, he or she may conduct an investigatory stop.  If not, 
the officer can simply wait until the driver commits a traffic 
violation, stop the vehicle based on that violation, and then 
attempt to get more information during the stop to corroborate 
that hunch.  See Commonwealth v. Cordero, 477 Mass. 237, 241 
(2017) ("A routine traffic stop may not last longer than 
reasonably necessary to effectuate the purpose of the stop" 
[quotations and citation omitted]). 
The problem with the authorization test is that it 
automatically categorizes any stop preceded by a traffic 
violation as "authorized," and therefore presumptively 
reasonable, regardless of the actual motivation for the stop.  
                     
 
5 It is worth noting that many types of traffic violations 
are civil in nature, not criminal.  See, e.g., Commonwealth v. 
Rodriguez, 472 Mass. 767, 770-771 (2015). 
11 
 
 
See Buckley, 478 Mass. at 869.  Because the test predetermines 
the outcome of any claim of unreasonableness for the purposes of 
art. 14, no actual reasonableness analysis is required (or 
allowed).  Incredibly, this is true even if the motive is 
unlawful.  See Santana, 420 Mass. at 209 ("Under [the 
authorization] test, it is irrelevant whether a reasonable 
police officer would have made the stop but for the unlawful 
motive" [citations omitted]).  In this case, for example, the 
officers discovered the inspection sticker violation prior to 
making the stop.6  Pursuant to Santana, the stop would likely be 
considered constitutionally reasonable under art. 14, even 
though the court concludes, and I agree, that the defendant 
successfully showed that it was racially motivated.  Such an 
outcome clearly is indefensible -- it hardly can be argued that 
a motor vehicle stop predicated on one's race is reasonable in 
any circumstance. 
                     
 
6 As Justice Cypher notes, the stop here was not based on a 
moving or equipment violation.  Instead, the officers discovered 
the inspection sticker violation only after deciding to check 
the vehicle's license plate number in a database.  However, just 
like a traffic stop based on an observed motor vehicle 
violation, a traffic stop resulting from a plate check is a 
seizure pursuant to art. 14 and the Fourth Amendment.  See 
generally Buckley, 478 Mass. at 865, quoting Rodriguez, 472 
Mass. at 773 ("Because '[a] police stop of a moving automobile 
constitutes a seizure,' . . . that stop must be reasonable in 
order to be valid under the Fourth Amendment and art. 14"). 
12 
 
 
The authorization test's reflexive and inflexible rule is 
at odds with the origins and purpose of art. 14.  Our cases 
acknowledge that the framers "wrote constitutional search 
protections in 'response to the reviled general warrants and 
writs of assistance of the colonial era, which allowed British 
officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for 
evidence of criminal activity'" (quotations omitted).  McCarthy, 
484 Mass. at 498-499, quoting Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. 
Ct. 2206, 2213 (2018).  See Commonwealth v. Blood, 400 Mass. 61, 
71 (1987) (adoption of art. 14 motivated by "[o]pposition to the 
search policies . . . which allowed officers of the crown to 
search, at their will, wherever they suspected [evidence of 
criminal activity] to be" [citation omitted]).  The general 
warrant epitomized the type of government intrusion that is 
intolerable under our Constitution:  invasions of privacy which 
technically are cloaked in legal authorization but are exercised 
in an arbitrary or unfair manner.  Given the broad discretion 
afforded to police officers by way of the authorization test and 
the ample opportunities they have to exercise that discretion, 
pretextual investigatory stops are comparable to the general 
warrants that were the impetus for art. 14.  And like general 
warrants, the fact that pretextual investigative stops are 
legally "authorized" does not make them tolerable.  See Blood, 
supra. 
13 
 
 
Notably, the nearly unlimited discretion granted to law 
enforcement officers to make pretextual traffic stops is an 
anomaly under our art. 14 jurisprudence.  For example, we do not 
permit investigatory stops of pedestrians unless police have 
reasonable suspicion "that a person has committed, is 
committing, or is about to commit a crime," based on "specific 
and articulable facts" (quotations and citations omitted).  See 
Bacon, 381 Mass. at 643.  "A mere 'hunch'" and "[s]imple good 
faith on the part of the officer" are not enough to justify an 
investigatory stop of a pedestrian (citation omitted).  Id.  Yet 
under the authorization test, the moment a driver commits (or 
the police discover) a motor vehicle violation, the occupants of 
a vehicle are exposed to the very same investigatory stops we 
rightly prohibit when they are on foot -- stops based on 
unsupported hunches, discrimination, harassment, or any other 
purpose lacking reasonable articulable suspicion of criminal 
activity.  See United States v. Botero-Ospina, 71 F.3d 783, 790 
(10th Cir. 1995), cert. denied, 518 U.S. 1007 (1996) (Seymour, 
C.J., dissenting) ("Given the multitude of applicable traffic 
and equipment regulations in any jurisdiction . . . upholding a 
stop on the basis of a regulation seldom enforced opens the door 
to the arbitrary exercise of police discretion condemned in 
Terry and its progeny"). 
14 
 
 
We also previously have recognized, and limited, the 
discretion law enforcement officers may exercise in the context 
of exit orders during motor vehicle stops.  In Gonsalves, 429 
Mass. at 660, 662, we concluded that although the Supreme Court 
held that the Fourth Amendment allows a police officer to issue 
exit orders during any lawfully executed traffic stop, see 
Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106, 111 (1977) (drivers), 
Maryland v. Wilson, 519 U.S. 408, 415 (1997) (passengers), art. 
14 prohibits the practice unless the officer has a reasonable 
belief that the officer's safety, or the safety of others, is 
threatened.  We rejected the Federal rule that "permit[s] 
automobile exit orders during any traffic stop, but which do not 
require that such orders be given," because we recognized that 
this unfettered discretion is "a clear invitation to 
discriminatory enforcement of the rule" (emphasis added).  See 
Gonsalves, supra at 664.  We further noted that "[c]itizens do 
not expect that police officers handling a routine traffic 
violation will engage, in the absence of justification, in 
stalling tactics, obfuscation, strained conversation, or 
unjustified exit orders, to prolong the seizure in the hope 
that, sooner or later, the stop might yield up some evidence of 
an arrestable crime."  Id. at 663. 
Thus, we take care to protect pedestrians from 
investigatory stops without reasonable suspicion, and drivers 
15 
 
 
from being unduly detained by an exit order during a traffic 
stop barring safety concerns.  However, the authorization test 
has created a markedly different standard when it comes to 
initiating a motor vehicle stop, as it provides officers with 
wide discretion to substitute pretext for reasonable suspicion 
as an investigatory tactic in the hopes that a hunch regarding 
criminal activity might bear fruit. 
The reasonable suspicion requirement is the linchpin of a 
valid investigatory stop under art. 14.  Using pretext to 
circumvent it breaks with our fundamental rules of search and 
seizure.  As observed by the Supreme Court of Washington: 
"[T]he problem with a pretextual traffic stop is that it is 
a search or seizure which cannot be constitutionally 
justified for its true reason (i.e., speculative criminal 
investigation), but only for some other reason (i.e., to 
enforce traffic code) which is at once lawfully sufficient 
but not the real reason.  Pretext is therefore a triumph of 
form over substance; a triumph of expediency at the expense 
of reason.  But it is against the standard of 
reasonableness which our constitution measures exceptions 
to the general rule, which forbids search or seizure absent 
a warrant.  Pretext is result without reason." 
 
Ladson, 138 Wash. 2d at 351.  If art. 14 is meant to protect 
individuals against the arbitrary exercise of power by agents of 
the Commonwealth, pretextual investigatory stops are in direct 
conflict with this objective.  As the authorization test creates 
a gaping hole in the foundational principle that a stop must be 
16 
 
 
backed by reasonable suspicion, I would abandon it.7  Instead, I 
would hold that a traffic violation cannot replace the 
reasonable suspicion required to make an investigatory stop 
under art. 14. 
3.  Detecting pretext:  the "would have" test.  Identifying 
a pretextual traffic stop may not be a straightforward task, but 
other courts and commentators have outlined what I conclude is a 
workable test.  Prior to Whren, many State courts, including 
courts in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, New York, Ohio, and 
Washington, employed various forms of the "reasonable officer," 
or "would have," test to determine the validity of a stop.  See 
State v. Brown, 930 N.W.2d 840, 902 (Iowa 2019) (Appel, J., 
dissenting) (collecting cases).  Although there are varying 
versions of that test, their common feature is that an alleged 
pretextual stop is valid only if a reasonable police officer 
"would have" made the stop in the absence of an ulterior motive; 
that is, a reasonable officer would have made the stop solely to 
enforce the motor vehicle infraction. 
                     
 
7 Although the court notes that after Whren was decided, a 
majority of States adopted a version of the authorization test, 
ante at    , it perhaps goes without saying that, regardless of 
what other jurisdictions have to say about their State 
constitutions, "ultimately we must accept responsibility for 
interpreting our own Constitution as text, precedent, and 
principle seem to us to require."  Planned Parenthood League of 
Mass., Inc. v. Attorney Gen., 424 Mass. 586, 590 (1997). 
17 
 
 
A version of the "would have" test has been adopted in 
Washington and New Mexico.  See State v. Arreola, 176 Wash. 2d 
284, 298 (2012).  However, it has been criticized as requiring a 
judge to discern an officer's subjective motives.  See Whren, 
517 U.S. at 815; Buckley, 478 Mass. at 867-868.  See also Brown, 
930 N.W.2d at 869 n.16 (Cady, C.J., dissenting) ("despite 
adopting the ['would have'] test, Washington courts may be 
reluctant to find that a police officer is lying about their 
motivations or 'have difficulty discerning pretextual behavior 
without an admission'" [citation omitted]); Lawton, The Road to 
Whren and Beyond:  Does the "Would Have" Test Work?, 57 DePaul 
L. Rev. 917, 935-936, 956-957 (2008). 
Under my proposed formulation of the test, the defendant 
need not prove, and the motion judge is not required to 
determine, the officer's true motive.  Instead, the question 
would be whether a reasonable officer would have made the stop 
solely for the purpose of traffic enforcement.8  See State v. 
                     
8 Although the court foresees difficulty in determining the 
characteristics of a reasonable officer, this standard is 
applied successfully in other circumstances.  See Commonwealth 
v. Barreto, 483 Mass. 716, 722 (2019), quoting Commonwealth v. 
Gonsalves, 429 Mass. 658, 661 (1999) (exit order based on safety 
concerns is justified where "a reasonably prudent [person] in 
the [officer's] position would be warranted in the belief that 
the safety of the police or that of other persons was in 
danger"); LaChance v. Commissioner of Correction, 463 Mass. 767, 
777-778 (2012), quoting Longval v. Commissioner of Correction, 
448 Mass. 412, 419 (2007) (qualified immunity standard asks 
18 
 
 
Sullivan, 340 Ark. 315, 318 (2000), cert. granted, judgment 
rev'd, 532 U.S. 769 (2001) ("Claims of pretextual arrest raise a 
unique problem in law -- deciding whether an ulterior motive 
prompted an arrest which otherwise would not have occurred.  
Confusion can be avoided by applying a 'but for' approach, that 
is, would the arrest not have occurred but for the other, 
typically, the more serious crime. . . .  The question then 
becomes whether [the defendant] would have been arrested simply 
for" purported traffic violation).  See also State v. Ochoa, 146 
N.M. 32, 44 (2008); Abramovsky & Edelstein, Pretext Stops and 
Racial Profiling After Whren v. United States:  The New York and 
New Jersey Responses Compared, 63 Alb. L. Rev. 725, 734-735 
(2000) (describing objective circumstantial factors New York 
courts considered when identifying pretext). 
Like the revised equal protection test announced by the 
court today, this version of the "would have" test allows a 
defendant to raise an inference that a stop was a pretext based 
on the circumstances of the stop.  It would allow for 
consideration of the same factors and likewise would operate 
under a burden-shifting framework.  See Ochoa, 146 N.M. at 44 
(listing factors).  See also State v. Heath, 929 A.2d 390, 403 
                     
whether "it would be clear to a reasonable officer that his 
conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted"). 
19 
 
 
(Del. Super. Ct. 2006).  The mechanics of this test to detect 
pretext, then, are very similar to the one the court presents to 
detect racial profiling.9 
Importantly, because all underlying motives lacking 
reasonable suspicion would be considered unreasonable under art. 
14, and therefore impermissible,10 this version of the test would 
avoid the fraught inquiry into whether an officer was in fact 
motivated by racial bias.11  The advantage of an objective "would 
                     
9 These similarities are not surprising, because many of the 
factors the court identifies as relevant to the totality of the 
circumstances analysis, ante at notes 9 and 10, are drawn from 
cases applying other jurisdictions' versions of the "would have" 
test.  See State vs. Deleon, N.M. Ct. App., No. 30,813 at 4-5 
(Feb. 14, 2013); People v. Roundtree, 234 A.D. 2d 612, 613 (N.Y. 
1996); State v. Arreola, 176 Wash. 2d 284, 301 (2012) (Chambers, 
J., dissenting); State v. Snapp, 174 Wash. 2d 177, 200-201 
(2012). 
 
10 The court cautions that analyzing pretextual stops under 
art. 14 would confuse the inquiry into whether a stop is 
unlawful because "our jurisprudence on search and seizure 
provides no guidance regarding which officer motivations render 
unreasonable an otherwise permissible traffic stop."  Ante at    
.  However, our art. 14 and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is 
quite clear that an "unlawful" search or seizure is an 
unreasonable one -- that is, any motive lacking reasonable 
suspicion of criminal activity would render a pretextual stop 
unreasonable.  See generally Commonwealth v. Alvarado, 423 Mass. 
266, 268 (1996); Commonwealth v. Bacon, 381 Mass. 642, 643 
(1980). 
 
 
11 The court posits that, like other versions of the "would 
have" test, this one inevitably would lead to an examination of 
subjective motives.  Ante at    .  I do not agree with this 
assessment; I conclude that much can be learned from the 
experiences in Washington and New Mexico where each employed an 
explicitly subjective test.  At any rate, as the court 
20 
 
 
have" test is that whatever purportedly race-neutral 
justification the Commonwealth might proffer as the true motive 
for the stop would be irrelevant to the question whether a 
reasonable officer would have made the stop as a traffic stop, 
absent any motive other than traffic enforcement.  Thus, the 
Commonwealth would not be able to justify a pretextual stop 
under the "would have" test I propose simply by substituting a 
facially neutral motive for the alleged race-based motive.12 
We have remarked that, generally, "police conduct is to be 
judged 'under a standard of objective reasonableness without 
                     
acknowledges, those subjective inquiries are "quite similar" to 
the court's equal protection analysis, which requires a 
subjective determination of whether racial bias was the true 
motive for the stop.  Ante at    .  Even assuming for the sake 
of argument that the "would have" test necessarily entails a 
subjective inquiry, the added benefits of undoing the 
authorization test, described infra, would justify the potential 
difficulty of formulating a workable test to identify pretext. 
 
 
12 The court points out that, like the revised equal 
protection test, this formulation of the "would have" test would 
not eliminate issues of less than candid police officers, or of 
judges reluctant to reject an officer's proffered motive for a 
stop.  I am under no illusions that an art. 14 approach is 
"magic."  See ante at    .  Righting the wrongs of the racism 
that have been plaguing this country since its inception has 
been slow-going -- some might say glacial.  Although I conclude 
that the approach I suggest could be part of a larger solution, 
it will take much more than any single judicial pronouncement 
(or concurrence) to increase the pace of progress.  Despite any 
perceived flaws in my suggested approach, I conclude that 
defendants who pursue claims of racial discrimination in 
connection with a traffic stop should be entitled to all 
available remedies, especially where, as discussed, such a stop 
plainly is unconstitutional under art. 14. 
21 
 
 
regard to the underlying intent or motivation of the officers 
involved.'"  Buckley, 478 Mass. at 867, quoting Santana, 420 
Mass. at 208.  The "would have" test, the hallmark of which is 
the reasonableness of an officer's actions pursuant to art. 14, 
squares neatly with art. 14's focus on objective reasonableness. 
4.  The court's approach.  To be sure, the revised equal 
protection test announced today will provide a measure of relief 
to defendants who raise claims of having been racially profiled.  
Indeed, as the court indicates, there are likely instances in 
which the revised equal protection analysis will be able to 
detect of racial profiling where an art. 14 inquiry would not.  
However, this revised test strengthens what is, in the end, a 
partial work-around to a complex problem that we have yet to 
solve. 
a.  Reliance on the equal protection approach alone leaves 
in place the unconstitutional practice of pretextual stops.  As 
discussed, pretextual stops are unreasonable pursuant to art. 
14's prohibition against unreasonable seizures.  Because the 
equal protection approach taken by the court prohibits only 
those pretextual stops motivated by race, the court's solution 
preserves the permissibility of pretextual stops based on any 
other ulterior motive.  And because the court concludes that it 
is unnecessary to analyze such stops under art. 14, 
investigatory stops made without reasonable suspicion of the 
22 
 
 
criminal activity sought to be investigated will continue 
unabated. 
It appears that the court previously has not examined the 
constitutionality of pretextual stops from an art. 14 
perspective.  When we essentially adopted the authorization test 
in Santana, 420 Mass at 208-209, we did not consider 
specifically the art. 14 consequences of automatically 
validating pretextual stops.  In that case, although the 
defendant argued that a broken tail light was used as a pretext 
to stop and search the vehicle, the motion judge did not so 
find.  Instead, the judge found that "the stop of the vehicle 
for defective equipment was a matter of routine standard police 
procedure."  Santana, supra at 209, citing Commonwealth v. 
Matchett, 386 Mass. 492, 510–511 (1982).  The Santana court 
accepted that finding and simply concluded that "the record does 
not support the contention that the troopers stopped the 
automobile in order to search it or to interrogate the 
defendants regarding illegal drug activities."  Id. at 209.  
Thus, pretext was discussed only briefly and was not truly at 
issue. 
Further, although the observation made in Santana, supra, 
that "Massachusetts cases follow the authorization approach" was 
supported with citations to prior Massachusetts cases, see id. 
at 208, pretext was not at issue in any of those cases, either.  
23 
 
 
See Commonwealth v. Petrillo, 399 Mass. 487, 489 (1987) (arrest 
for trespass); Commonwealth v. Ceria, 13 Mass. App. Ct. 230, 235 
(1982) (Terry-type analysis of stop of man riding moped in park 
by officers on foot); Commonwealth v. Tisserand, 5 Mass. App. 
Ct. 383, 386 (1977) (automobile double-parked on public street 
appropriately approached by police). 
Since Santana was decided, we specifically have affirmed 
the principle that a stop legally authorized by the observation 
of a motor vehicle violation, including where the observed 
violation is pretext for an unrelated motivation, is per se 
reasonable for the purposes of art. 14, but we have not 
explained why.  See Buckley, 478 Mass. at 869 ("a traffic stop 
cannot be 'arbitrary,' because it is predicated on a driver 
violating a traffic law").  See also, e.g., Larose, 483 Mass. 
323 327 (2019); Buckley, supra at 865-866; Feyenord, 445 Mass. 
at 75-76. 
In Lora, although the defendant challenged his stop on both 
equal protection and art. 14 grounds, we dispensed with the art. 
14 argument by quoting the authorization test, and then went on 
to analyze only the equal protection claim.  See Lora, 451 Mass. 
at 435-436.  In Buckley, 478 Mass. at 781, because the defendant 
had "expressly disavowed any . . . argument that race was a 
factor in the stop at issue," we declined to reexamine "our 
general art. 14 standard governing the reasonableness of traffic 
24 
 
 
stops."  Instead, we reviewed Lora's discussion of Santana and 
Whren, and summarily stated that, "to the extent we do consider 
the purpose of a stop when assessing its validity, we do so 
pursuant to the equal protection principles of arts. 1 and 10 
[of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights] -- not art. 14's 
guarantee against unreasonable seizures."  Id. at 870.  Thus, 
despite the fact that Santana often is cited for the proposition 
that pretextual stops are valid, see, e.g., Larose, 483 Mass. at 
327; Buckley, 478 Mass. at 865; Commonwealth v. Blevines, 438 
Mass. 604, 608 (2003); Commonwealth v. Gentile, 437 Mass. 569, 
576 (2002); Commonwealth v. Barros, 435 Mass. 171, 180 n.4 
(2001), there is no case of which I am aware that specifically 
has considered whether using pretext to make an investigatory 
stop without reasonable suspicion of the crime sought to be 
investigated is a violation of art. 14, and if not, why not.13 
                     
13 Similarly, the Supreme Court's decision in Whren did not 
fully elaborate on the reasoning behind its oft-cited holding 
that "the constitutional basis for objecting to intentionally 
discriminatory application of laws is the Equal Protection 
Clause, not the Fourth Amendment" and that "[s]ubjective 
intentions play no role in ordinary, probable-cause Fourth 
Amendment analysis."  See Whren, 517 U.S. at 813.  The Whren 
Court rested its conclusion almost entirely on precedents that 
had not addressed the reasonableness of traffic stops made for a 
reason other than routine traffic enforcement.  See LaFave, The 
"Routine Traffic Stop" from Start to Finish:  Too Much 
"Routine," Not Enough Fourth Amendment, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 1843, 
1856 (2004) ("By this reckless use of its own precedents, the 
Court in Whren makes it appear that the issue raised by the 
petitioners was already settled, while in fact it was very much 
25 
 
 
Today, the court reiterates that "the constitutional basis 
for objecting to intentionally discriminatory application of 
laws is the Equal Protection Clause, not the Fourth Amendment" 
or art. 14, but fails to explain why.  See Lora, 451 Mass. at 
436, quoting Whren, 517 U.S. at 813.  However, a pretextual stop 
also properly is analyzed under art. 14, just like any other 
warrantless stop.  Without reasonable suspicion of criminal 
activity (other than the traffic violation), I conclude that 
such stops are not justifiable under art. 14.  For that reason, 
I conclude that the court's decision today leaves in place an 
investigatory practice that is unconstitutional. 
b.  The revised equal protection test is necessary but is 
not alone sufficient.  The revisions to the test the court 
announces today undoubtedly will make it easier for a defendant 
to raise an inference of discriminatory intent.  However, 
because the authorization test is left intact, it will be 
possible for the Commonwealth to rebut an inference of racial 
profiling by pointing to a hunch of criminal activity, based on 
                     
an open question.  The fact that the Court created this false 
appearance perhaps explains why the Court in Whren had so little 
to say about the merits of the petitioners' claim"). 
 
26 
 
 
factors that ostensibly are race-neutral but are in fact proxies 
for race.14 
For example, an officer could testify that the stop was 
based on the officer's recognition of the vehicle or an occupant 
from a prior interaction or observation, conversations with 
other officers, or information in a gang database.  These are 
the same factors currently used by police to racially profile 
people of color.  See generally Commonwealth v. Warren, 475 
Mass. 530, 539-540 (2016) (according to study of Boston police 
field interrogation and observation reports, "[B]lack men in the 
city of Boston were more likely to be targeted for police-
civilian encounters such as stops, frisks, searches, 
observations, and interrogations.  Black men were also 
disproportionately targeted for repeat police encounters"); 
Inside the Boston Police Gang Database, WGBH, July 30, 2019, 
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2019/07/30/inside-the-
boston-police-gang-database [https://perma.cc/N475-MS5K] (noting 
stark racial disparities and errors in individuals included in 
police gang database). 
In addition to well-disguised proxies for conscious racial 
bias, unconscious bias is also at play and by definition may not 
                     
 
14 As discussed infra, even if race-neutral, any factors 
that together fail to establish reasonable articulable suspicion 
of criminal activity unrelated to a traffic violation are 
insufficient to conduct an investigatory stop under art. 14. 
27 
 
 
be easily identified.  See generally D. Weisburd & M.K. 
Majmundar, eds., Proactive Policing:  Effects on Crime and 
Communities, ch. 7, Racial Bias and Disparities in Proactive 
Policing, 251, 277-280 (2018) (collecting studies on unconscious 
racial bias); id. at 277 ("Although overt expressions of biased 
behavior have declined in society and among police, racial 
animus has not disappeared.  Rather, it has evolved"); Norton, 
Vandello, Sommers, & Darley, Mixed Motives and Racial Bias, 12 
Psychol. Pub. Pol'y & L. 36, 39 (2006), and studies cited 
("people are quite good at masking their biased behavior by 
couching it in more acceptable terms, both to avoid the 
appearance of impropriety and as part of a more general effort 
to view themselves and their choices positively"). 
Furthermore, we know that judges traditionally are 
reluctant to reject race-neutral explanations based on what 
happens when they are required to rule on them in the context of 
jury selection.15  In fact, the Batson framework has been 
criticized for this very reason, i.e., the unwillingness of 
judges to make a finding that the nondiscriminatory reason 
                     
 
15 Under the Batson framework, a party may challenge a 
peremptory strike by raising an inference of discrimination 
which the opposing party may rebut by proffering a 
nondiscriminatory reason for the strike.  Batson v. Kentucky, 
476 U.S. 79, 93-96 (1986).  See Commonwealth v. Soares, 377 
Mass. 461, 486-488, cert. denied, 444 U.S. 881 (1979).  It is 
for the judge to determine whether the party seeking to exercise 
the peremptory strike has met its burden. 
28 
 
 
proffered to explain a peremptory strike is not the actual 
reason for the strike.  See Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 93-
96 (1986); Bellin & Semitsu, Widening Batson's Net to Ensnare 
More Than the Unapologetically Bigoted or Painfully 
Unimaginative Attorney, 96 Cornell L. Rev. 1075, 1092, 1098-
1099, 1127 (2011) (analysis of Federal court opinions and orders 
evaluating race-based Batson challenges from 2000 through 2009 
revealed "[a] broad subset of reasons [accepted by courts to 
justify a challenged strike], while not race-based per se, seem 
to correlate with race, suggesting that an attorney seeking to 
eliminate all the members of a certain race from the jury could 
achieve much of that goal by focusing on purportedly 'race-
neutral' factors that happen to correlate with race"); Cavise, 
The Batson Doctrine:  The Supreme Court's Utter Failure to Meet 
the Challenge of Discrimination in Jury Selection, 1999 Wis. L. 
Rev. 501, 545 (1999) ("The savvy litigator can succeed with the 
most blatant discriminatory purpose by a simple manipulation of 
the neutral explanation coupled with a dose of 
disingenuousness"). 
Statistical data are not as susceptible to being explained 
away with race-neutral justifications and therefore will, as the 
court indicates, continue to have "unique advantages" over other 
types of evidence.  However, the available data on the racial 
demographics of motorists involved in traffic stops continues to 
29 
 
 
be severely limited, which is the very reason that Lora did not 
work for defendants alleging racial profiling.16  Although this 
defendant was able to collect sufficient data (consisting of the 
six most recent years of officer-specific field investigation 
and observation reports and citations), it is unlikely that 
other defendants will be able to follow suit.17 
                     
16 Even if sufficient data is theoretically available, 
practically speaking we cannot expect every defendant to have 
the resources to collect, analyze, and present existing data to 
make a prima facie case of discrimination.  See State v. Brown, 
930 N.W.2d 840, 865 n.8 (Iowa 2018) (Cady, C.J., dissenting), 
quoting Jackson, Profiling the Police:  Flipping 20 Years of 
Whren on its Head, 85 UMKC L. Rev. 671, 680 (2017) ("On average, 
to take an equal protection claim to trial costs anywhere from 
$45,000 up to $125,000"). 
 
17 I agree that statistical evidence is an excellent form of 
evidence and that it can be a vital part of demonstrating that a 
stop was based on race, particularly when implicit bias is at 
play.  Nonetheless, there are lingering concerns about the 
availability and accessibility of necessary data. 
 
In 2019 the Legislature enacted G. L. c. 90, § 63, which 
requires municipalities to report annually traffic stop data.  
See St. 2019, c. 122, § 10.  I am not aware of any reports or 
data yet published pursuant to that statute.  The court notes 
that a bill currently under consideration "likely would enable 
defendants to access publicly available, department-wide data on 
the demographics of all traffic stops in the relevant 
municipality, and would provide a plethora of relevant data 
available to support (or weaken) equal protection claims."  Ante 
at    . It appears that neither the 2019 act nor the bill 
currently under consideration would guarantee defendants access 
to the officer-specific data that the defendant analyzed here.  
Moreover, even assuming a showing of a department-wide, as 
opposed to an officer-specific, pattern of racial profiling 
would be a sufficient statistical showing, the shortcomings I 
raise regarding the one-time collection of similar data pursuant 
to St. 2000, c. 228, apply equally to the new data sets, which 
30 
 
 
The most recent Statewide dataset on racial profiling in 
traffic stops of which we have been made aware is a May 2004 
report prepared by experts at Northeastern University pursuant 
to St. 2000, c. 228.  Analyzing motor vehicle citations issued 
by every police department in the Commonwealth from April 1, 
2001, through June 30, 2003, the experts concluded that 249 of 
the Commonwealth's 366 police departments appeared to have 
engaged in racial or gender profiling.18  See Farrell, McDevitt, 
                     
are also aggregated by municipality and therefore may obscure 
particular race-based stops or the actions of individual biased 
officers.  Given the experience after Lora, if past is prologue, 
we have no assurance that such information will be available in 
the future. 
 
18 The experience with the Legislature's attempt to mandate 
data collection on racial profiling via St. 2000, c. 228, 
further illustrates the uncertainty of defendants' access to 
useful data for equal protection claims.  Pursuant to that act, 
in 2005 the Secretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety 
(Secretary) ordered the 249 police departments found by the 
Northeastern experts to have engaged in racial or gender 
profiling to collect additional data on all traffic stops for 
one year, including information on the identities of officers 
making such stops.  See St. 2000, c. 228, § 10.  See generally 
Boston Police Patrolmen's Ass'n, Inc. v. Police Dep't of Boston, 
446 Mass. 46, 48-49 (2006).  In that case, the union for Boston 
police officers sought to enjoin the collection of officer 
identities in this second phase of data collection.  Id. at 47.  
We held that, "[i]n order to fulfil the Act's objective of 
eliminating profiling by police officers," the Secretary could 
require the collection of data identifying the officer making 
the stop during this second phase.  See id. at 52-53.  However, 
by the time Lora was decided in 2008, "nearly one-half of the 
targeted police departments did not follow recommended 
guidelines and the State did not receive or review any data" 
collected pursuant to the second phase of data collection by 
departments found to have engaged in racial or gender profiling.  
See Lora, 451 Mass. at 449 (Ireland, J., concurring). 
31 
 
 
Bailey, Andresen, & Pierce, Massachusetts Racial and Gender 
Profiling Study:  Final Report, Institute on Race and Justice of 
Northeastern Univ., at 1, 30 (May 4, 2004). 
For a defendant challenging a traffic stop by an officer in 
one of those 249 departments, this 2004 study may be sufficient 
to raise an inference of racial profiling if unrebutted by more 
recent data.  But for defendants stopped by officers of any of 
the 117 departments that were not found to have engaged in 
racial profiling in 2004, it is unclear whether any data 
currently exists that could raise a statistical inference of 
racial profiling.  More generally, data showing an over-all 
pattern of racially evenhanded stops by a department (or by an 
individual officer) may belie particular instances of racial 
profiling that are not apparent in the aggregation of numerous 
stops.  The vast majority of stops by an officer or department 
may be race-neutral; however, data demonstrating an over-all 
pattern of fairness should not preclude a remedy for an outlier 
racially motivated stop. 
Despite the foregoing, the court's revised test 
unquestionably increases a defendant's chances of demonstrating 
racial discrimination.  Indeed, the scenarios the court foresees 
in which traffic stops that pass muster under the "would have" 
test are nonetheless products of racially discriminatory 
decisions about where to deploy police officers, illustrate the 
32 
 
 
continuing importance of the equal protection remedy.  
Nevertheless, the ability to proceed on both equal protection 
and art. 14 grounds would give defendants an even greater 
opportunity to establish illegal discrimination. 
c.  Equal protection is not the only constitutional 
guarantee available to address racial discrimination.  Today the 
court continues to analyze claims of racial profiling solely 
through an equal protection lens, without explaining why such 
claims do not also implicate art. 14.  The court's failure to 
engage this question at all is particularly bewildering because 
the answer seems straightforward:  surely a stop based on race 
is an unreasonable seizure under art. 14. 
 
Historically, equal protection of the laws, enshrined in 
both the Declaration of Rights and the United States 
Constitution, never has been the only constitutional avenue for 
redressing racial injustices.  In fact, many Supreme Court cases 
that granted to all criminal defendants what are now basic 
procedural rights originated from the mistreatment of people of 
color.  See, e.g., Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 444-445 
(1966) (right to Miranda warnings); Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 
U.S. 335, 344-345 (1963) (right to counsel); Powell v. Alabama, 
287 U.S. 45, 68-69 (1932) (same); Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 
278, 287 (1936) (right to be interrogated free from coercion); 
Capers, supra at 7 n.45 (noting that "an earlier draft of 
33 
 
 
[Miranda] was explicit about the racial dynamics of police 
interrogations"); id. at 8 (noting that in Gideon, "relying 
heavily on the racially-tinged Scottsboro Boys case . . . the 
Court clearly recognized the impact its decision would have on 
minority defendants especially, given the correlation, at the 
time [and today], between race and indigence").  See also 
Klarman, The Racial Origins of Modern Criminal Procedure, 99 
Mich. L. Rev. 48, 48(2000) ("the linkage between the birth of 
modern criminal procedure and southern [B]lack defendants is no 
fortuity"); Kahan & Meares, Foreword:  The Coming Crisis of 
Criminal Procedure, 86 Geo. L.J. 1153, 1153 (1998) ("The need 
that gave birth to the existing criminal procedure regime was 
institutionalized racism"); Pye, The Warren Court and Criminal 
Procedure, 67 Mich. L. Rev. 249, 256 (1968) ("The Court's 
concern with criminal procedure can be understood only in the 
context of the struggle for civil rights").  As succinctly put 
by Kahan & Meares, supra: 
"Law enforcement was a key instrument of racial repression, 
in both the North and the South, before the 1960's civil 
rights revolution.  Modern criminal procedure reflects the 
Supreme Court's admirable contribution to eradicating this 
incidence of American apartheid.  Supplanting the 
deferential standards of review that had until then 
characterized its criminal procedure jurisprudence, the 
Court, beginning in the 1960's and continuing well into the 
1970's, erected a dense network of rules to delimit the 
permissible bounds of discretionary law-enforcement 
authority.  Although rarely couched as such, the 
unmistakable premise of these doctrines was the assumption 
34 
 
 
that communities could not be trusted to police their own 
police because of the distorting influence of racism. 
 
There is no reason why a defendant claiming that a stop was 
motivated by race should be barred from seeking a remedy for an 
unreasonable seizure violative of art. 14 in addition to an 
equal protection claim.  Cf. Goodridge v. Department of Pub. 
Health, 440 Mass. 309, 320 (2003) (analyzing restrictions on 
marriage under equal protection and due process doctrines, "two 
constitutional concepts [which] frequently overlap").  See 
Brown, 930 N.W.2d at 920 (Appel, J., dissenting) ("Certainly, 
the theoretical availability of an equal protection claim should 
not preempt the possibility of a claim under search and seizure 
principles").19 
5.  Conclusion.  In 1999, then-Associate Justice Ireland 
broached the issue of racially discriminatory motor vehicle 
                     
19 Obviously, this approach would affect substantially more 
stops than those where, as here, the defendant alleges that the 
ulterior motive for the stop was racial discrimination.  As 
discussed, supra, art. 14's bedrock protection against 
unreasonable seizures applies to all pretextual stops, not only 
those based on race.  Just as we should not sanction as 
reasonable a traffic stop based explicitly on a driver's race, 
we also should not allow stops based on nothing more than, for 
example, the driver's hairstyle or the apparent expense of the 
car relative to the neighborhood in which it is traveling.  See 
Brown, 930 N.W.2d at 928 (Appel, J., dissenting), quoting United 
States v. Scopo, 19 F.3d 777, 786 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 513 
U.S. 877 (1994) (Newman, C.J., concurring).  Given the 
historical and ongoing connection between systemic law 
enforcement practices and racial discrimination, it is not at 
all surprising that an effective remedy for racial profiling 
entails a broader prohibition on the use of pretextual stops. 
35 
 
 
stops, noting that, by that time, the "widespread public 
concerns about police profiling, commonly referred to as 'DWB -- 
driving while [B]lack,' ha[d] been the subject of much 
discussion and debate both across the country and within the 
Commonwealth."  See Gonsalves, 429 Mass. at 670 (Ireland, J., 
concurring).  It would be nearly ten years before the court 
addressed the problem directly.  See Lora, 451 Mass. 426.  
Unfortunately, for the reasons previously discussed, Lora was 
not effective in solving the problem of racially motivated motor 
vehicle stops.  Twelve years after Lora was decided, and more 
than two decades since the issue first was raised by Justice 
Ireland, we have a chance to revisit the question of how to 
craft a remedy that will provide relief to people in the 
Commonwealth who are targeted on the basis of the color of their 
skin. 
This time around we should confront squarely the fact that 
the phenomenon of racial profiling is a product of more than 
one-off cases of individual bias or animus -- it is a systemic 
problem that has flourished under the rules that this court has 
set.  A systemic solution requires more than an improved test 
for identifying individual instances of bias when they come 
before courts.  It requires a reevaluation of the rules that 
enable and incentivize officers to make pretextual race-based 
36 
 
 
stops in the first place.20  Combining the court's improved test 
for identifying particular cases of race-based stops with a 
broader prohibition on pretextual stops would deter racial 
profiling and eliminate the tool most often used to accomplish 
it.  More generally, as long as we continue to allow pretextual 
stops, the search and seizure protections of art. 14 will 
continue to ring hollow. 
In the twenty-five years since deciding Santana, the court 
has not examined the art. 14 implications of the pretextual 
stops that are legitimized by the authorization test.  Given the 
opportunity to broaden the options available to combat racial 
profiling, it is disappointing that the court is willing to 
stand behind a rule that allows for pretextual stops without 
considering whether, and how, such stops are reasonable from an 
                     
 
20 As I advocate for adding an option to proceed under art. 
14 in addition to the court's solution, there is no need to 
compare which strategy is better -- I conclude that a defendant 
should have the option to choose either, or both.  The 
difference between my position and that of the court is not a 
disagreement regarding "the best legal analysis"; it is a 
question of which position is more comprehensive. 
 
 
I differ with the court, however, with regard to what is 
meant by a systemic solution.  The court is of course correct 
that improvements in data collection will further illustrate the 
existence of systemic racism in traffic stops.  But using new 
data to confirm the existence of an already undeniable systemic 
problem is not the same as changing the system of rules and 
practices that perpetuate racial discrimination in policing.  A 
focus on individual instances of race-based stops without 
addressing the rule that enables them cannot be considered a 
systemic approach, no matter how well-meaning it may be. 
37 
 
 
art. 14 standpoint.  See Amado, 474 Mass. at 151 n.4 (pretextual 
stops, "though lawful under our current jurisprudence, implicate 
important policy concerns about racial profiling in encounters 
between the police and persons of color"); Lora, 451 Mass. at 
447 (Ireland, J., concurring), quoting Feyenord, 445 Mass. at 87 
(Greaney, J., concurring) ("I repeat the observation of Justice 
Greaney that poorer citizens, who likely would include 
minorities, are more likely to be 'driving vehicles with 
defective equipment,' thus providing police with a legitimate 
reason to exercise discretion to stop them"). 
As evidenced by the letter that the full court issued 
recently, we are united in the goal to "ensure that the justice 
provided to African-Americans is the same that is provided to 
white Americans."  Letter from the Seven Justices to Members of 
the Judiciary and Bar (June 3, 2020).  It is worth reiterating, 
however, that systemic or institutional racism produces racially 
disparate outcomes regardless of the intent of the people who 
work within the institution.  See id.  Our current state of 
affairs is not what any one of the Justices who comprise this 
court chose or would choose.  It nevertheless is a painful fact. 
I conclude that evaluating this form of racial profiling 
under art. 14 not only would resolve an inconsistency in our 
search and seizure jurisprudence but also would go a long way, 
38 
 
 
at long last, toward addressing the systemic problem of racial 
profiling with a systemic solution. 
 
 
 
CYPHER, J. (concurring).  I agree with Justice Gaziano that 
lessening the burden on the defendant in the Lora test is the 
best approach to address the disparate effects of automobile 
stops on minority communities.  See Commonwealth v. Lora, 451 
Mass. 425, 440-442 (2008).  I write separately to emphasize two 
points. 
First, the officers' stop of the defendant did not result 
from an observed traffic violation, but rather from conducting a 
query regarding the defendant's license plates.1  There was no 
observed traffic violation that motivated the officers to query 
the plates; however, there is no expectation of privacy in a 
license plate number, which is required by law to be displayed 
conspicuously on the exterior of a vehicle.  G. L. c. 90, § 6.  
See Commonwealth v. McCarthy, 484 Mass. 493, 502 & n.8 (2020), 
discussing Commonwealth v. Starr, 55 Mass. App. Ct. 590, 593-594 
(2002).2 
                     
 
1 Through a mobile computer, "[a]n officer inputs license 
plate numbers, and, within seconds, receives various information 
in reply, including the type of vehicle that is assigned to the 
plate, whether the vehicle is registered, whether the vehicle 
owner has an active license, and whether any warrants are 
outstanding."  See Commonwealth v. Muckle, 61 Mass. App. Ct. 
678, 679 n.3 (2004). 
 
 
2 It is well established that there is a "lesser expectation 
of privacy in a motor vehicle because its function is 
transportation and it seldom serves as one's residence or as the 
repository of personal effects."  Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U.S. 
583, 590 (1974). 
2 
 
 
 
Although the random stop of a motor vehicle has been held 
to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States 
Constitution, a random number plate check is not.  Starr, supra 
at 594.  See United States v. Diaz-Castaneda, 494 F.3d 1146, 
1151-1152 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 552 U.S. 1031 (2007). 
That does not mean, however, that a race-based decision to 
query plates is permissible.  See Starr, supra at 594 n.8.  Much 
like a decision to selectively perform a traffic stop based on 
race, the querying of plates based on race is a potential 
violation of the principles of equal protection.  Even though 
there are no limitations under art. 14 of the Massachusetts 
Declaration of Rights or the Fourth Amendment on querying 
license plates, the start of the analysis in some cases should 
be the decision to query the plates.  In the event that a judge 
determines, based on the totality of the circumstances, that an 
officer's decision to query plates was motivated by racial or 
ethnic bias, the remedy remains suppression of evidence obtained 
during the subsequent stop.  See Lora, 451 Mass. 425 439-440. 
Second, Massachusetts places the enforcement of motor 
vehicle laws with the police.  Under G. L. c. 90C, § 3 (A) (1), 
"if a police officer observes or has brought to the officer's 
attention the occurrence of a civil motor vehicle infraction," 
the officer may issue a warning or citation.  Indeed, in some 
circumstances, a police officer or his or her employer may face 
3 
 
 
liability for failing to address a public safety hazard created 
by a driver.  See Irwin v. Ware, 392 Mass. 745, 764 (1984) (jury 
could have found that town's police officers had duty to 
plaintiffs and that police officers' negligence in failing to 
remove intoxicated driver proximately caused plaintiffs' 
injuries).  As Justice Budd's opinion has demonstrated, the 
problem we are confronting today is systemic in nature and 
therefore requires a systemic solution.  Such a solution, 
however, requires the full engagement of all of the relevant 
interests, including the public and the police, and perhaps the 
Legislature.  See, e.g., Berkeley council approves "omnibus 
motion" on police reform, Berkeleyside, July 15, 2020, 
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/07/15/berkeley-council-
approves-omnibus-motion-to-reform-policing 
[https://perma.cc/S7UP-VGZL].