Last May, the Court of Appeals found that District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Officer Clifford Vanterpool violated the Fourth Amendment's protections against "unreasonable searches and seizures" when he stopped "R.W." in February 2023 while investigating a report of a suspicious vehicle near an apartment building.
In a per curiam opinion Monday, the justices held that the D.C. Court of Appeals improperly carved key facts — the radio dispatch reporting a suspicious vehicle at the apartment complex and the unprovoked flight of the two passengers who ran from the car when the police cruiser arrived — out of the reasonable-suspicion analysis instead of considering the full "totality of the circumstances," as required by Supreme Court precedent. The case will now head back to D.C. court for further proceedings.
But in her dissent, Justice Jackson defended the D.C. court's approach and criticized the other justices for reviewing the case in the first place, and to summarily issue a ruling without a hearing.
"I am not sure why our Court sees fit to intervene in this case, let alone to do so summarily," she wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor would have denied review of the case.
In 1968, in Terry v. Ohio
, the U.S. Supreme Court held that police may temporarily stop and question someone without probable cause — a higher legal standard — if they have a reasonable suspicion that the person may be involved in criminal activity. Later high court decisions clarified that the "totality of the circumstances" determines whether reasonable suspicion exists.When Vanterpool arrived at the scene around 2 a.m. on Feb. 7, 2023, after receiving a radio dispatch about a suspicious vehicle, he saw two people immediately fleeing the parked car. R.W. began to reverse out of the parking spot with one of the rear doors still open and then stopped. Vanterpool blocked him in and questioned him. As a result, R.W. was hit with various charges, including felony receipt of stolen property.
Before trial, R.W. tried unsuccessfully to suppress evidence obtained after he was stopped, arguing the officer didn't have reasonable suspicion to stop him. The trial court found that four facts justified the stop: the radio dispatch, the people fleeing the vehicle, the early morning hours, and the fact that R.W. began backing out of a parking space as the officer approached the car.
The Court of Appeals reversed the denial of the motion to suppress, saying it "excised" the radio dispatch call and the flight of R.W.'s companions from the reasonableness analysis finding that Vanterpool lacked a valid reason to make a stop until R.W. began backing up the car. The remaining two factors, D.C.'s highest court held, were not enough to make the stop conform to the Fourth Amendment's demands.
The U.S. Supreme Court wholly disagreed. In the per curiam opinion, the court said R.W.'s own actions, combined with the panicked flight of his companions, "strongly suggested that he was (like them) engaged in unlawful conduct he wished to hide from police."
The justices faulted the Court of Appeals for excluding legally relevant facts from the analysis, saying it defied rules spelled out in decisions like United States v. Cortez
and United States v. Sokolow that established the totality of circumstances framework."Pretending that the most revealing aspect of the encounter did not happen is incompatible with the totality-of-the-circumstances approach required by our precedents," the justices said in the per curiam opinion. "After watching two people flee from a suspicious car, a reasonable officer surely would question the driver's next move. Why would the driver hurriedly back up the car without even closing a car door left open by his fleeing companions?"
Justice Jackson, however, responded that the Court of Appeals correctly applied the rules, simply weighing the facts involved in the stop, and deciding the ones it deemed more important.
"Courts excise facts from their analyses every day," she wrote. "This is how courts write opinions."
Her dissent pointed to nuances she thought her colleagues were leaving out. When applied to the facts of a case, Justice Jackson wrote, "No 'totality-of-the-circumstances' test really lives up to its name." Even the per curiam court, the dissenting justice wrote, was omitting facts that it deemed insignificant, such as the make and model of the car, the precise location of the stop, or the color of R.W.'s friends' clothing.
"Though it does not say so, the Court 'excises' those facts, too," Justice Jackson wrote. "It does not thereby misapply the Fourth Amendment."
The District of Columbia is represented by Caroline Sage Van Zile of the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia.
R.W. is represented by Jaclyn S. Frankfurt of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.
The case is District of Columbia v. R.W., case number 25-248, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.
Correction: A previous version of this story included the wrong appeals court. The error has been corrected.