Opinion ID: 1407728
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Terry v. Ohio: the Reasonable, Articulable Suspicion Standard

Text: In State v. Watkins , this Court said: The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures. U.S. Const. amend. IV. It is applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It applies to seizures of the person, including brief investigatory detentions such as those involved in the stopping of a vehicle. 337 N.C. 437, 441, 446 S.E.2d 67, 69-70 (1994) (alteration in original) (citations omitted). The Supreme Court of the United States has held that a law enforcement officer may initiate a brief stop and frisk of an individual if there are specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). And in determining whether the officer acted reasonably in such circumstances, due weight must be given, not to his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or `hunch,' but to the specific reasonable inferences which he is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his experience. Id. at 27, 88 S.Ct. 1868 (citation omitted). Since Terry, the reasonable, articulable suspicion standard has been applied to brief investigatory traffic stops. See United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 881-82, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 45 L.Ed.2d 607 (1975); Watkins, 337 N.C. at 441, 443, 446 S.E.2d at 70-71. The majority suggests there has been confusion following Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 116 S.Ct. 1769, 135 L.Ed.2d 89 (1996), as to whether a traffic stop is constitutional if supported by reasonable, articulable suspicion. I cannot acknowledge such confusion, at least among the decisions of this Court issued after Whren was decided. However, the imprecise language employed by the majority opinion paints over the important and intuitive distinction between an investigatory traffic stop, to which the reasonable, articulable suspicion standard has been applied, and a traffic stop performed on the basis of a  perceived traffic violation, to which we recently applied the standard of probable cause in State v. Ivey. See 360 N.C. 562, 564, 633 S.E.2d 459, 461 (2006) (emphasis added).