by Site Staff in News
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse" does not apply to government agents looking for reasons to perform a stop.
The Supreme Court struck another blow to the Bill of Rights with its 8-1 decision to expand police powers in situations where the police perform traffic stops based on imaginary laws. The Heien v. North Carolina decision held that an officer’s “reasonable mistake of law” can lead to an allowable search and arrest for contraband.The case arose from a 2009 traffic stop in North Carolina, in which motorist Nicholas Heien was stopped by police for driving with one broken brake light. That stop led to a search of Heien’s vehicle, which in turn led to the discovery of illegal drugs. The twist came from the fact that North Carolina law does not provide the legal pretext for an officer to perform a stop for one broken brake light. State law requires that drivers maintain only one operable “stop lamp” — not two.
The court disagreed. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the maxim “ignorance of the law is no excuse” does not apply to the government in this area of law.
In other words, the police can be totally wrong in their pretexts for initiating stops, and the fruits of the illegitimate stop are OK to use in court.
The Supreme Court struck another blow to the Bill of Rights with its 8-1 decision to expand police powers in situations where the police perform traffic stops based on imaginary laws. The Heien v. North Carolina decision held that an officer’s “reasonable mistake of law” can lead to an allowable search and arrest for contraband.
The case arose from a 2009 traffic stop in North Carolina, in which motorist Nicholas Heien was stopped by police for driving with one broken
The twist came from the fact that North Carolina law does not provide the legal pretext for an officer to perform a stop for one broken brake light. State
No person shall sell or operate on the highways of the State any motor vehicle, motorcycle or motor-driven cycle, manufactured after December 31, 1955, unless it shall be equipped with a stop lamp on the rear of the vehicle. The stop lamp shall display a red or amber light visible from a distance of not less than 100 feet to the rear in normal sunlight, and shall be actuated upon application of the service (foot) brake. The stop lamp may be incorporated into a unit with one or more other rear lamps.The officer was mistaken about the law and had no legal grounds to force the driver to stop. The baseless stop led to an arrest. The courts were left to decide if the fruits of this illegitimate traffic stop could be used as evidence to uphold a conviction.
“The government should be presumed to know the laws,” argued attorney Jeffrey Fisher, who represented Mr. Heien before the Supreme Court. “It would undercut public confidence in law enforcement and the common law rule upon which the
The court disagreed.
In other words, the police can be totally wrong in their pretexts for initiating stops, but not in the charges applied thereafter.
On December 15th, 2014, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s decision and made the case into a national precedent. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan.
Chief
Justice Roberts vaguely promised that the court’s decision “does not
discourage officers from learning the law,” because only objectively
reasonable mistakes were permitted. “An officer can gain no Fourth Amendment advantage through a sloppy study of the laws he is duty-bound to enforce.”
Writing alone in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized her
colleagues for giving the police so much leeway. “One is left to
wonder,” she wrote, “why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder
the burden of being seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an
interpretative question.” In Sotomayor’s view, “an officer’s mistake of
law, no matter how reasonable, cannot support the individualized
suspicion necessary to justify a seizure under the Fourth Amendment.”This expansion of police power can be traced directly back to the liberty-destroying War on Drugs. A free society cannot coexist with this legion of government agents, obsessing daily over searching citizens for contraband.
READ THE DECISION: HEIEN v. NORTH CAROLINA