A police stop and search conducted over a “mistake of the law” on the police officer’s behalf is still lawful, according to the Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in Heien v. North Carolina. The police officer has not violated the Fourth Amendment as long as their misunderstanding of the law is “reasonable.”
The case arose in 2009, when a police officer pulled over a driver for having a brake light out. In some states, that’s a violation—but it’s not in North Carolina, where an arcane law on the books requires only one “stop lamp” on the vehicle.
At the time, however, the police officer believed this was an actual violation, and along the way discovered that the driver had drugs in his car.
The driver later argued in court that he had been pulled over erroneously, and the court sided with his interpretation of the brake-light law. But the state then argued that, before this case, an officer could reasonably be mistaken about the confusing and outdated brake-light law.
The Supreme Court was faced with determining how all this relates to the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches. Is an incorrect understanding of the law enough to satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirement?
The court’s majority opinion justified their decision like this: “[T]o be reasonable is not to be perfect, and so the Fourth Amendment allows for some mistakes on the part of government officials, giving them ‘fair leeway for enforcing the law in the community’s protection.’”
But, as The Economist noted, the ruling becomes more troublesome when they come to define the limit of this leeway. “The limit is that ‘the mistakes must be those of reasonable men.’ ”
Any mistake of a reasonable man is a fairly broad standard. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor objected that “Giving officers license to effect seizures so long as they can attach to their reasonable view of the facts some reasonable legal interpretation (or misinterpretation) that suggests a law has been violated significantly expands this authority.”
According to Sotomayor, “an officer’s mistake of law, no matter how reasonable, cannot support the individualized suspicion necessary to justify a seizure under the Fourth Amendment.”
In Heien’s brief, he had similarly advocated for the need for stricter limitations on police authority, asking the court to define “…what limitations exist on officers’ ability to use wholly innocent conduct on this Nation’s roadways as justification for seizing individuals to investigate inarticulable suspicions of impropriety.”
Several months ago, Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy postulated that this case might not have a significant impact on the Fourth Amendment, since the court did not rule on whether the evidence of drug use should be admitted or suppressed. The “exclusionary rule” forbids the government from admitting evidence obtained by violating the Constitution, but “The issue comes to the Court as a case about what violates the Fourth Amendment, not which violations of the Fourth Amendment trigger the exclusionary rule,” Kerr wrote.
“Given the uncertain scope of the federal exclusionary rule these days, a possible ruling for the defense at the rights stage might just be a prelude to a later defeat at the remedies stage under the Fourth Amendment,” he continued.
Kerr has some further thoughts in the wake of the decision, observing that “it leaves some complications that have some interesting implications for lower courts and for the relationship between Fourth Amendment rights and remedies.”
