Brief of Professors of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner in Carlisle V. Kentucky

Abstract

Abstract Mr. Carlisle was a passenger in a vehicle stopped by a police officer for suspected vehicle equipment violations. The officer lacked reasonable suspicion, let alone probable cause, to suspect Mr. Carlisle was armed and dangerous, or that he was guilty of engaging in any criminal conduct. All that the officer knew was that Mr. Carlisle, a black man, was a passenger in a vehicle stopped for a minor traffic violation. Despite the absence of any fact-based justification for doing so, the officer demanded that Mr. Carlisle provide identification and ran a criminal background check. The Supreme Court of Kentucky held that police officers are automatically entitled to demand that a passenger like Mr. Carlisle provide identification and then to conduct background investigations of them merely because the passengers were riding in a motor vehicle stopped for a minor traffic violation. This approach—allowing police unregulated discretion to conduct criminal history checks of every vehicle occupant at every traffic stop, permits precisely the sort of arbitrary and unjustified government intrusions prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. By failing to impose even minimal Fourth Amendment standards, the Kentucky Supreme Court grants officers arbitrary authority to subject people to a seizure and search based solely on a hunch. In the absence of facts creating at least reasonable suspicion that passengers are engaged in criminal conduct, or reason to believe that they pose a threat to officer safety, requiring mere passengers to identify themselves and running criminal background checks on them unnecessarily extends the length of detention (a seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes) and exceeds the mission of a valid traffic stop. If allowed to stand, the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision would permit officers to exercise arbitrary and unjustified authority in more than 1.5 million traffic stops conducted every month.