Court Opinion

ID: 9426198
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:04.950588+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:59.576312
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring in the judgment.
I join in the affirmance of the judgment. The stopping of respondent’s automobile solely because its occupants appeared to be of Mexican ancestry was a patent violation of the Fourth Amendment. I cannot agree, however, with the standard the Court adopts to measure the lawfulness of the officers’ action. The Court extends the “suspicion” test of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968), to the stop of a moving automobile. I dissented from the adoption of the suspicion test in Terry, believing it an unjustified weakening of the Fourth Amendment’s protection of citizens from arbitrary interference by the police. I remarked then:
“The infringement on personal liberty of any 'seizure’ of a person can only be 'reasonable’ under the Fourth Amendment if we require the police to possess 'probable cause’ before they seize him. Only that line draws a meaningful distinction between an officer’s mere inkling and the presence of facts within the officer’s personal knowledge which would convince a reasonable man that the person seized has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a particular crime.” Id., at 38.
The fears I voiced in Terry about the weakening of the Fourth Amendment have regrettably been borne out by subsequent events. Hopes that the suspicion test might be employed only in the pursuit of violent crime — a limitation endorsed by some of its proponents* — have now been dashed, as it has been applied *889in narcotics investigations, in apprehension of “illegal” aliens, and indeed has come to be viewed as a legal construct for the regulation of a general investigatory police power. The suspicion test has been warmly embraced by law enforcement forces and vigorously employed in the cause of crime detection. In criminal cases we see those for whom the initial intrusion led to the discovery of some wrongdoing. But the nature of the test permits the police to interfere as well with a multitude of law-abiding citizens, whose only transgression may be a nonconformist appearance or attitude. As one commentator has remarked:
“ ‘Police power exercised without probable cause is arbitrary. To say that the police may accost citizens at their whim and may detain them upon reasonable suspicion is to say, in reality, that the police may both accost and detain citizens at their whim.1 ” Amsterdam, Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment, 58 Minn. L. Rev. 349, 395 (1974).
The uses to which the suspicion test has been put are illustrated in some of the cases cited in the Court’s opinion. In United States v. Wright, 476 F. 2d 1027 (CA5 1973), for example, immigration officers stopped a station wagon near the border because there was a spare tire in the back seat. The court held that the officers reasonably suspected that the spare wheel well had been freed in order to facilitate the concealment of aliens. In United States v. Bugarin-Casas, 484 F. 2d 853 (CA9 1973), the Border Patrol officers encountered a man driving alone in a station wagon which was “riding low”; stopping the car was held reasonable because the officers suspected that aliens might have been hidden beneath the floorboards. The vacationer whose car is weighted down with luggage will find no comfort in these decisions; nor will the many law-abiding citi*890zens who drive older vehicles that ride low because their suspension systems are old or in disrepair. The suspicion test has indeed brought a state of affairs where the police may stop citizens on the highway on the flimsiest of ■justifications.
The Court does, to be sure, disclaim approval of the particular decisions it cites applying the suspicion test. But by specifying factors to be considered without attempting to explain what combination is necessary to satisfy the test, the Court may actually induce the police to push its language beyond intended limits and to advance as a justification any of the enumerated factors even where its probative significance is negligible.
Ultimately the degree to which the suspicion test actually restrains the police will depend more upon what the Court does henceforth than upon what it says today. If my Brethren mean to give the suspicion test a new bite, I applaud the intention. But in view of the developments since the test was launched in Terry, I am not optimistic. This is the first decision to invalidate a stop on the basis of the suspicion standard. In fact, since Terry we have granted review of a case applying the test only once, in Adams v. Williams, 407 U. S. 143 (1972), where the Court found the standard satisfied by the tip from an informant whose credibility was not established and whose information was not shown to be based upon personal knowledge. If in the future the suspicion test is to provide any meaningful restraint of the police, its force must come from vigorous review of its applications, and not alone from the qualifying language of today’s opinion. For now, I remain unconvinced that the suspicion test offers significant protection of the “comprehensive right of personal liberty in the face of governmental intrusion,” Lopez v. United States, 373 U. S. 427, 455 (1963) (dissenting opinion), that is embodied in the Fourth Amendment.

See LaFave, “Street Encounters” and the Constitution, 67 Mich. L. Rev. 39, 66-66 (1968).