Court Opinion

ID: 9429184
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:25:55.13713+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:17.727089
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion; it demonstrates convincingly that the California statute at issue in this case, Cal. Penal Code Ann. § 647(e) (West 1970), as interpreted by California courts, is unconstitutionally vague. Even if the defect identified by the Court were cured, however, I would hold that this statute violates the Fourth Amendment.1 Merely to facilitate the general law enforcement objectives of investigating and preventing unspecified crimes, States may not authorize the arrest and criminal prosecution of an individual for failing to produce identification or further information on demand by a police officer.
*363It has long been settled that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the seizure and detention or search of an individual’s person unless there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime, except under certain conditions strictly-defined by the legitimate requirements of law enforcement and by the limited extent of the resulting intrusion on individual liberty and privacy. See Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U. S. 721, 726-727 (1969). The scope of that exception to the probable-cause requirement for seizures of the person has been defined by a series of cases, beginning with Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968), holding that a police officer with reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, based on articulable facts, may detail! a suspect briefly for purposes of limited questioning and, in so doing, may conduct a brief “frisk” of the suspect to protect himself from concealed weapons. See, e. g., United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S. 873, 880-884 (1975); Adams v. Williams, 407 U. S. 143, 145-146 (1972). Where probable cause is lacking, we have expressly declined to allow significantly more intrusive detentions or searches on the Terry rationale, despite the assertion of compelling law enforcement interests. “For all but those narrowly defined intrusions, the requisite ‘balancing’ has been performed in centuries of precedent and is embodied in the principle that seizures are ‘reasonable’ only if supported by probable cause.” Dunaway v. New York, 442 U. S. 200, 214 (1979).2
*364Terry and the cases following it give full recognition to law enforcement officers’ need for an “intermediate” response, short of arrest, to suspicious circumstances; the power to effect a brief detention for the purpose of questioning is a powerful tool for the investigation and prevention of crimes. Any person may, of course, direct a question to another person in passing. The Terry doctrine permits police officers to do far more: If they have the requisite reasonable suspicion, they may use a number of devices with substantial coercive impact on the person to whom they direct their attention, including an official “show of authority,” the use of physical force to restrain him, and a search of the person for weapons. Terry v. Ohio, supra, at 19, n. 16; see Florida v. Royer, 460 U. S. 491, 498-499 (1983) (opinion of White, J.); United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U. S. 544, 554 (1980) (opinion of Stewart, J.). During such an encounter, few people will ever feel free not to cooperate fully with the police by answering their questions. Cf. 3 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 9.2, pp. 53-55 (1978). Our case reports are replete with examples of suspects’ cooperation during Terry encounters, even when the suspects have a great deal to lose by cooperating. See, e. g., Sibron v. New York, 392 U. S. 40, 45 (1968); Florida v. Royer, supra, at 493-495.
The price of that effectiveness, however, is intrusion on individual interests protected by the Fourth Amendment. We have held that the intrusiveness of even these brief stops for purposes of questioning is sufficient to render them “seizures” under the Fourth Amendment. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S., at 16. For precisely that reason, the scope of seizures of the person on less than probable cause that Terry *365permits is strictly circumscribed to limit the degree of intrusion they cause. Terry encounters must be brief; the suspect must not be moved or asked to move more than a short distance; physical searches are permitted only to the extent necessary to protect the police officers involved during the encounter; and, most importantly, the suspect must be free to leave after a short time and to decline to answer the questions put to him.
“[T]he person may be briefly detained against his will while pertinent questions are directed to him. Of course, the person stopped is not obliged to answer, answers may not be compelled, and refusal to answer furnishes no basis for an arrest, although it may alert the officer to the need for continued observation.” Id., at 34 (White, J., concurring).
Failure to observe these limitations converts a Terry encounter into the sort of detention that can be justified only by probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. See Florida v. Royer, 460 U. S., at 501 (opinion of White, J.); id., at 509-511 (Brennan, J., concurring in result); Dunaway v. New York, supra, at 216.
The power to arrest — or otherwise to prolong a seizure until a suspect had responded to the satisfaction of the police officers — would undoubtedly elicit cooperation from a high percentage of even those very few individuals not sufficiently coerced by a show of authority, brief physical detention, and a frisk. We have never claimed that expansion of the power of police officers to act on reasonable suspicion alone, or even less, would further no law enforcement interests. See, e. g., Brown v. Texas, 443 U. S. 47, 52 (1979). But the balance struck by the Fourth Amendment between the public interest in effective law enforcement and the equally public interest in safeguarding individual freedom and privacy from arbitrary governmental interference forbids such expansion. See Dunaway v. New York, supra; United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 878. Detention beyond the limits *366of Terry without probable cause would improve the effectiveness of legitimate police investigations by only a small margin, but it would expose individual members of the public to exponential increases in both the intrusiveness of the encounter and the risk that police officers would abuse their discretion for improper ends. Furthermore, regular expansion of Terry encounters into more intrusive detentions, without a clear connection to any specific underlying crimes, is likely to exacerbate ongoing tensions, where they exist, between the police and the public. See Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 157-168 (1968).
In sum, under the Fourth Amendment, police officers with reasonable suspicion that an individual has committed or is about to commit a crime may detain that individual, using some force if necessary, for the purpose of asking investigative questions.3 They may ask their questions in a way calculated to obtain an answer. But they may not compel an answer, and they must allow the person to leave after a reasonably brief period of time unless the information they have acquired during the encounter has given them probable cause sufficient to justify an arrest.4
California cannot abridge this constitutional rule by making it a crime to refuse to answer police questions during a *367Terry encounter, any more than it could abridge the protections of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by making it a crime to refuse to answer police questions once a suspect has been taken into custody. To begin, the statute at issue in this case could not be constitutional unless the intrusions on Fourth Amendment rights it occasions were necessary to advance some specific, legitimate state interest not already taken into account by the constitutional analysis described above. Yet appellants do not claim that § 647(e) advances any interest other than general facilitation of police investigation and preservation of public order — factors addressed at length in Terry, Davis, and Dunaway. Nor do appellants show that the power to arrest and to impose a criminal sanction, in addition to the power to detain and to pose questions under the aegis of state authority, is so necessary in pursuit of the State’s legitimate interests as to justify the substantial additional intrusion on individuals’ rights. Compare Brief for Appellants 18-19 (asserting that § 647(e) is justified by state interest in “detecting and preventing crime” and “protecting the citizenry from criminal acts”), and People v. Solomon, 33 Cal. App. 3d 429, 436-437, 108 Cal. Rptr. 867, 872 (1973) (§ 647(e) justified by “the public need involved,” i. e., “protection of society against crime”), with United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, supra, at 884 (federal interest in immigration control permits stops at the border itself without reasonable suspicion), and California v. Byers, 402 U. S. 424, 456-458 (1971) (Harlan, J., concurring in judgment) (state interest in regulating automobiles justifies making it a crime to refuse to stop after an automobile accident and report it). Thus, because the State’s interests extend only so far as to justify the limited searches and seizures defined by Terry, the balance of interests described in that case and its progeny must control.
Second, it goes without saying that arrest and the threat of a criminal sanction have a substantial impact on interests protected by the Fourth Amendment, far more severe than *368we have ever permitted on less than probable cause. Furthermore, the likelihood that innocent persons accosted by law enforcement officers under authority of § 647(e) will have no realistic means to protect their rights compounds the severity of the intrusions on individual liberty that this statute will occasion. The arrests it authorizes make a mockery of the right enforced in Brown v. Texas, 443 U. S. 47 (1979), in which we held squarely that a State may not make it a crime to refuse to provide identification on demand in the absence of reasonable suspicion.5 If § 647(e) remains in force, the validity of such arrests will be open to challenge only after the fact, in individual prosecutions for failure to produce identification. Such case-by-case scrutiny cannot vindicate the Fourth Amendment rights of persons like appellee, many of whom will not even be prosecuted after they are arrested, see ante, at 354. A pedestrian approached by police officers has no way of knowing whether the officers have “reasonable suspicion” — without which they may not demand identification even under § 647(e), ante, at 356, and n. 5 — because that condition depends solely on the objective facts known to the officers and evaluated in light of their experience, see Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S., at 30; United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 884-885. The pedestrian will know that to assert his rights may subject him to arrest and all that goes with it: new acquaintances among jailers, lawyers, prisoners, and bail bondsmen, firsthand knowledge of local jail conditions, a “search incident to arrest,” and the expense of defending against a possible prosecution.6 The only response to be *369expected is compliance with the officers’ requests, whether or not they are based on reasonable suspicion, and without regard to the possibility of later vindication in court. Mere reasonable suspicion does not justify subjecting the innocent to such a dilemma.7
By defining as a crime the failure to respond to requests for personal information during a Terry encounter, and by permitting arrests upon commission of that crime, California attempts in this statute to compel what may not be compelled under the Constitution. Even if § 647(e) were not unconstitutionally vague, the Fourth Amendment would prohibit its enforcement.

 We have not in recent years found a state statute invalid directly under the Fourth Amendment, but we have long recognized that the government may not “authorize police conduct which trenches upon Fourth Amendment rights, regardless of the labels which it attaches to such conduct.” Sibron v. New York, 392 U. S. 40, 61 (1968). In Sibron, and in numerous other cases, the Fourth Amendment issue arose in the context of a motion by the defendant in a criminal prosecution to suppress evidence against him obtained as the result of a police search or seizure of his person or property. The question thus has always been whether particular conduct by the police violated the Fourth Amendment, and we have not had to reach the question whether state law purporting to authorize such conduct also offended the Constitution. In this case, however, appellee Edward Lawson has been repeatedly arrested under authority of the California statute, and he has shown that he will likely be subjected to further seizures by the police in the future if the statute remains in force. See Los Angeles v. Lyons, ante, at 106-109; Gomez v. Layton, 129 U. S. App. D. C. 289, 394 F. 2d 764 (1968). It goes without saying that the Fourth Amendment safeguards the rights of those who are not prosecuted for crimes as well as the rights of those who are.

 A brief detention is usually sufficient as a practical matter to accomplish all legitimate law enforcement objectives with respect to individuals whom the police do not have probable cause to arrest. For longer detentions, even though they fall short of a full arrest, we have demanded not only a high standard of law enforcement necessity, but also objective indications that an individual would not consider the detention significantly intrusive. Compare Dunaway v. New York, 442 U. S., at 212-216 (seizure of suspect without probable cause and custodial interrogation in police station violates Fourth Amendment), and Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U. S. 721, 727-728 (1969) (suspect may not be summarily detained and taken to police station for fingerprinting but may be ordered to appear at a specific time), *364with Michigan v. Summers, 452 U. S. 692, 701-705 (1981) (suspect may be detained in his own home without probable cause for time necessary to search the premises pursuant to a valid warrant supported by probable cause). See also Florida v. Royer, 460 U. S. 491, 500 (1983) (opinion of White, J.) (“least intrusive means” requirement for searches not supported by probable cause).

 Police officers may have a similar power with respect to persons whom they reasonably believe to be material witnesses to a specific crime. See, e. g., ALI Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure §110.2(1)(b) (Proposed Official Draft 1975).

 Of course, some reactions by individuals to a properly limited Terry encounter, e. g., violence toward a police officer, in and of themselves furnish valid grounds for arrest. Other reactions, such as flight, may often provide the necessary information, in addition to that which the officers already possess, to constitute probable cause. In some circumstances it is even conceivable that the mere fact that a suspect refuses to answer questions once detained, viewed in the context of the facts that gave rise to reasonable suspicion in the first place, would be enough to provide probable cause. A court confronted with such a claim, however, would have to evaluate it carefully to make certain that the person arrested was not being penalized for the exercise of his right to refuse to answer.

 In Brown we had no need to consider whether the State can make it a crime to refuse to provide identification on demand during a seizure permitted by Terry, when the police have reasonable suspicion but not probable cause. See 443 U. S., at 53, n. 3.

 Even after arrest, however, he may not be forced to answer questions against his will, and — in contrast to what appears to be normal procedure during Terry encounters — he will be so informed. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966). In fact, if he indicates a desire to remain silent, the police should cease questioning him altogether. Id., at 473-474.

 When law enforcement officers have probable cause to believe that a person has committed a crime, the balance of interests between the State and the individual shifts significantly, so that the individual may be forced to tolerate restrictions on liberty and invasions of privacy that possibly will never be redressed, even if charges are dismissed or the individual is acquitted. Such individuals may be arrested, and they may not resist. But probable cause, and nothing less, represents the point at which the interests of law enforcement justify subjecting an individual to any significant intrusion beyond that sanctioned in Terry, including either arrest or the need to answer questions that the individual does not want to answer in order to avoid arrest or end a detention.