Posted on 04/06/2020 9:07:04 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a Kansas police officer acted lawfully when he stopped a car whose owner’s license was suspended before confirming it was in fact the owner behind the wheel.
In an 8-1 opinion, the justices said the officer’s assumption that the owner was driving was reasonable, given the officer had no reason to think the vehicle was being operated by someone else.
“We hold that when the officer lacks information negating an inference that the owner is the driver of the vehicle, the stop is reasonable,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority in a case that pit road safety against drivers’ privacy rights.
The ruling was a defeat for defendant Charles Glover, who had argued the traffic stop violated the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable search and seizure, and could encourage similar police stops across the country, even in cases where someone other than the car’s owner is driving.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
The single holdout should be removed from the court. This is a simple case of probable cause.
Seams reasonable. The cop on the beat can’t be expected to read minds or ID the driver through a rear window from 200 yards away.
But what if the single holdout is a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences who would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male?
Obama’s appointee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority opinion misapplied prior Supreme Court search-and-seizure rulings in a manner that “unnecessarily reduces the state’s burden of proof.”
“The consequence of the majority’s approach is to absolve officers from any responsibility to investigate the identity of a driver where feasible,” Sotomayor wrote. “But that is precisely what officers ought to do — and are more than capable of doing.
But some legal experts said the ruling did not mark a dramatic shift in the justices’ approach to search-and-seizure cases. “It’s a straightforward decision that doesn’t break new theoretical ground,” said Orrin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley.
The opinion in this case, Kansas v. Glover, reverses and remands a decision by the Kansas Supreme Court that found the officer had stopped Glover without reasonable suspicion.
“Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying the majority opinion misapplied prior Supreme Court search-and-seizure rulings in a manner that “unnecessarily reduces the state’s burden of proof.”
There ya go. No surprise I imagine.
Fair enough.
Some I-owe-wah SP was pacing me for a while while he looked up the vehicle’s owner’s [me] outstanding/priors. Finding nothing to catch, he sped off in short order, even though I was in the 15% of drivers going above the speed limit [prior to my sudden awareness of immediate surveillance].
Sioux City later got me for $100 [Safety violation] with a speed camera on a different trip.
It happens.
Wouldn't you know.....
Is this a case of driving while black disguised as something else? I find it hard to imagine any justification for such a simple case to go as far as SCOTUS.
Somehow I knew it was the dumb Latina, Somehow.
No mention of why the license plate check was done.
“No mention of why the license plate check was done.”
I the first sentence of the article, it is stated that the owner of the vehicle had a suspended driver’s license. It seems reasonable to assume that the owner of the vehicle was also the driver. To the dissenter, however, this assumption seemed unreasonable.
Many police departments are able to run every single plate electronically with cameras and a computer link.
Every plate in camera range is run without the officer having to do anything but drive the car.
They drive up and down parking lots, too.
If a plate is on the wanted list, the system notifies the driver and puts up a pic of the vehicle.
These systems have been around for a very long time and they have gotten smaller and smaller every couple years.
Then of course there’s always the chance that the cop just recognizes the car as one that probably shouldn’t be on the road.
UNLESS, it’s a Black male. They NEVER drive their own cars (do they own any?) It’s always the girlfriends car, or their mom’s car, or grandma’s car, or some guy they don’t know just let them borrow his car, or a rental.
COPS, LIVE PD, LIVE Rescue shows are a REAL education. No actors, no FAKE NEWS, not FAUX reality shows, REAL reality shows.
In other words the underbelly of “LIFE” on display.
If a plate gets flagged, and the officer does nothing, and that driver turns out to be one of America’s Most Wanted, THAT would be a problem.
Make the stop, check the ID, discover he’s not the one that was flagged, apologize and move on with your day. No harm, no foul.
I am adamantly opposed to random check stops by police and other violations of reasonable search and seizure they do without just cause.
I agree with this court decision. If police see a car owned by a person they know to have a suspended license, I believe they have reasonable suspicion to assume the car is being driven by the owner. It is not a violation of Constitutional rights to check on that IMHO.
I am furious that they can pull over people and demand you tell them if you are carrying legally. I am furious they can bring a dog to sniff your car pulling you over for a bad tail light or cracked windshield. In those cases, you should just be cited and sent on your way. Every contact these days is an opportunity for a cop to say “you are acting suspiciously” or “I smelled marijuana”. That is BS.
I have no problem with this court’s decision. I hate far more things the police are doing violating our rights. The police state is advancing fast.
The police check every license plate they come across these days. I woujld not be surprised if it is software that uses license plate recognition and automatically checks it against a database of stolen cars and cars owned by drives with suspended licenses, as well as owenrs who have convictions for DUI or drug possession/distribution.
Your license plate is considered public and there is no expectation of privacy. Any cop can check any licence plate any time.
It's authored by Thomas. Sadly, Justice Thomas has a blind spot when the issue is overreach of police powers. He's still the best one of the bunch, but this is a disappointing aspect of his worldview IMO.
That is the BS part that we need to get overturned.
#5. What did we expect from a graduate of “La Raza University”, “The Voz of Atlan Night School of Marxist Thought and Explosives”, and the leftist school of thought that good laws should not be enforced?
She is legal trash!
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