Court Opinion

ID: 9491129
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:04:25.333883+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:31.522215
License: Public Domain

DENNIS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. “In the context of border area stops, the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment demands something more than the broad and unlimited discretion sought by the Government.” United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 882, 95 S.Ct. 2574, 2580-81, 45 L.Ed.2d 607 (1975). “Except at the border and its functional equivalents, officers on roving patrol may stop vehicles only if they are aware of specific articulable facts, together with rational inferences from those facts, that reasonably warrant suspicion that the vehicles contain aliens who may be illegally in the country.” Id. at 884, 95 S.Ct. at 2582. Despite the mastery displayed by the majority opinion, I do not believe that the officers in the present case were able to point to specific articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences therefrom, reasonably justified a suspicion that Nichols’s vehicle contained aliens illegally in the country or was engaged in other criminal activity. The probative significance of the combined enumerated factors relied upon by the officers was negligible; because the vehicle stop here was based almost completely on the officers’ subjective determinations, it crossed the line beyond which the stopping of automobiles upon “reasonable suspicion” grounds runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Escamilla, 560 F.2d 1229 (5th Cir. 1977).