Terry v. Ohio

The "stop-and-frisk" practice—which comprises stopping a person suspected of involvement in a crime, briefly searching their clothing for weapons, and questioning them, all without requiring their consent and without enough grounds to arrest them—has long been routinely employed by all major American police forces.[1] "Stop-and-frisk" was traditionally viewed as a "low visibility" police procedure, and prior to 1960 was "largely ignored by commentators and dealt with ambiguously by most courts."[2]

However, in the early 1960s, several major changes in American criminal law raised the issue's importance. First, in 1961, the Supreme Court ruled in Mapp v. Ohio that the exclusionary rule applied to the U.S. states as well as the federal government. Then, in 1966, the Supreme Court ruled in Miranda v. Arizona that the Fifth Amendment requires courts to exclude confessions that law enforcement obtains without first giving certain specific legal warnings.[3] The "stop-and-frisk" practice became a popular topic in law reviews, and a number of prominent articles were written on the subject.[4] Several cases forced state supreme courts to address the practice more directly, such as the Supreme Court of California's 1963 decision in People v. Mickelson.[5] Finally, in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the issue in Terry.[6]

The Terry case involved an incident that took place on October 31, 1963, in Cleveland, Ohio. A local policeman named Martin McFadden was on duty in downtown Cleveland and noticed two men standing on a street corner. He watched one of the men, John W. Terry, walk down the street, stop in front of a certain store, look through its window, then briefly continue on before turning around and returning to where he started, stopping on his way back to look in the store window again. Then the other man, Richard Chilton, did the same thing. McFadden watched the pair repeat this routine about a dozen times, then a third man joined them and the three walked up the street together toward the store. McFadden suspected that the men were "casing" the store in preparation for robbing it, so he followed and confronted them. He asked the men's names, and they gave noncommittal mumbling answers. McFadden then grabbed the two men, spun them around, and patted down their exterior clothing and discovered that they both had pistols in their jacket pockets.[7]

After discovering the pistols, McFadden arrested Terry and Chilton, and they were both charged with illegally carrying concealed weapons. At trial, Terry's lawyer made a motion to suppress the evidence of the discovered pistol, arguing that the "frisk" by which McFadden had discovered it was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and therefore that the judge should be exclude the pistol from evidence per the exclusionary rule. The trial judge denied his motion on the basis that the "stop-and-frisk" was generally presumed legal, and Terry was convicted. He appealed to the Ohio District Court of Appeals, which affirmed his conviction, then appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio, which dismissed his appeal.[8] He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case and granted certiorari.

Eight justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The Court began by stating that, contrary to Ohio's arguments, policeman McFadden's stopping, questioning, and frisking of Terry and Chilton constituted actual "searches" and "seizures" under the Fourth Amendment. However, the Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment "searches" and "seizures" that occurred during a "stop-and-frisk" were so "limited" and "brief" that they did not require the police to have probable cause beforehand.[9] Reasoning that police officers' need to protect themselves outweighed the limited intrusions involved, the Court ruled that officers could "stop and frisk" a person if they had "reasonable suspicion" that crime was afoot, and did not need the higher level of "probable cause".[10] The Court defined this new, lesser standard of "reasonable suspicion" as being less than "probable cause" but more than just a hunch, stating that "the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant [the] intrusion."[11]

The Court stated that this "reasonable suspicion" standard must apply to both the initial stop and the frisk.[12] First, it stated that a police officer must have reasonable suspicion to stop a suspect in the first place.[12] Second, it held that an officer could then "frisk" a stopped suspect if he or she had reasonable suspicion that the suspect was armed and dangerous, or if, in the officer's experience, the suspected criminal activity was of a type that was "likely" to involve weapons.[13] The officer's "frisk" could only be for the sole purpose of ensuring the suspect was not armed, and so had to be limited to a pat-down of the suspect's outer clothing.[12]

The Court then applied these legal principles to McFadden's actions with Terry and found that they comported with the "reasonable suspicion" standard. McFadden had years of experience as a policeman, and was able to articulate the observations that led him to suspect that Terry and the other men were preparing to rob the store. Since McFadden reasonably suspected that the men were preparing for armed robbery, he reasonably suspected that Terry was armed, and so his frisk of Terry's clothing was permissible and did not violate Terry's Fourth Amendment rights.[12]

The Court ended its opinion by framing the issue very narrowly, saying the question it was answering was "whether it is always unreasonable for a policeman to seize a person and subject him to a limited search for weapons unless there is probable cause for an arrest."[14] In answer to this limited question, the Court said it was not. It ruled that when an American policeman observes "unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous", it is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment for the policeman to conduct a "stop-and-frisk" of the people he suspects.[14]