Opinion ID: 390190
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the meaning of arrest under the fourth amendment

Text: 125 The foregoing review of Supreme Court cases demonstrates that the Court's emphasis has been on fleshing out the stop and frisk doctrine first articulated in Terry. In fact, in only one case since Terry has the Court made even a modest attempt to delineate the differences between an arrest and a less intrusine stop. The distinction between an arrest and a stop is crucial in many cases, however, for an arrest can be made only on probable cause, while a stop is proper under the more relaxed reasonable suspicion standards of Terry. 126 Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 99 S.Ct. 2248, 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979), is the one case in which the Court took the occasion to explain the legal distinctions between an arrest and a Terry stop. In Dunaway, the police acted on a tip to pick up the petitioner and bring him to police headquarters for questioning about a robbery and homicide. After some interrogation the petitioner made inculpatory statements and sketches. 127 The state conceded that the police had no probable cause to arrest the petitioner when they brought him to the station. Instead, the state characterized the police action as less than an arrest, and therefore permissible under the Fourth Amendment because the police had a 'reasonable suspicion' that petitioner possessed 'intimate knowledge about a serious and unsolved crime.'  Id. at 207, 99 S.Ct. at 2253. The Supreme Court rejected this argument and reversed the petitioner's conviction, reasoning that the police had arrested the petitioner without probable cause to do so. 128 The Court in Dunaway reaffirmed the general rule that an arrest may be made only on probable cause. Terry standards, by contrast, were applicable to intrusions that are so much less severe than that involved in traditional 'arrests.'  Id. at 209, 99 S.Ct. at 2254. The narrow intrusions involved in (Terry and its progeny) were judged by a balancing test rather than by the general principle that Fourth Amendment seizures must be supported by the 'long-prevailing standards' of probable cause, only because these intrusions fell far short of the kind of intrusion associated with an arrest. Id. at 212, 99 S.Ct. at 2256 (citation omitted). In other words, any detention greater than requests for identification or an explanation of suspicious circumstances must be based on consent or probable cause. United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 882, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 2580, 45 L.Ed.2d 607 (1975). 129 In Dunaway, the Court found the seizure to be in important respects indistinguishable from a traditional arrest. 442 U.S. at 212, 99 S.Ct. at 2556. First, the petitioner was not questioned briefly where he was found. Id. Second, he was never informed that he was free to go and, in fact, would have been restrained had he tried to leave. Third, even though the police did not tell the petitioner that he was under arrest, such an omission obviously (does) not make petitioner's seizure even roughly analogous to the narrowly defined intrusions involved in Terry and its progeny. Id. at 212-13, 99 S.Ct. at 2256-57. The Court feared that to measure the seizure in Dunaway under the Terry standards would threaten to swallow the general rule that Fourth Amendment seizures are 'reasonable' only if based on probable cause. Id. at 213, 99 S.Ct. at 2256. 130