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NOTEWORTHY DECISIONS The Noteworthy Decisions section of this site contains excerpts from important decisions rendered by the United States Supreme Court after January 2001. [The election-deciding ruling in Bush v. Gore (2000) is excerpted in Chapter Five of the 13th edition.] These most recent cases are presented in a format similar to the cases in the book. The author will add edited versions of other significant decisions soon after they come down.
Legal Services Corporation v. Velazquez Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition Board of Education of Pottawatomie County v. Earls Republican Party of Minnesota v. White Atwater v. City of Lago Vista (This case may be read in connection with Chapter Nine.) 69 U.S.L.W. 4262, 121 S.Ct. 1536, 149 L.Ed. 2d 549 (2001) http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-1408.ZS.html Texas law makes it a misdemeanor, punishable only by fine, either for a front-seat passenger in a car equipped with safety belts not to wear one or for the driver to fail to secure any small child riding in front. State law also expressly authorizes the warrantless arrest of anyone violating these provisions, but police, at their discretion, may issue citations in place of arrest. Bart Turek, a police officer in Lago Vista, observed Gail Atwater driving her truck with her small children riding unrestrained in the front seat. Turek pulled Atwater over, verbally berated her, handcuffed her, placed her in his squad car, and drove her to the local police station, where she was made to remove her shoes, jewelry, and eyeglasses, and empty her pockets. Officers took her "mug shot" and placed her in a jail cell for an hour, after which she was taken before a magistrate and released on bond. She pleaded no contest to the seatbelt misdemeanors and paid a $50 fine. She and her husband then filed suit alleging that the city had violated her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizure. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas found the Fourth Amendment claim meritless. Sitting en banc, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed. Majority: Souter, Kennedy, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas. Dissenting: O’Connor, Breyer, Ginsburg, Stevens. JUSTICE SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court. The question is whether the Fourth Amendment forbids a warrantless arrest for a minor criminal offense, such as a misdemeanor seatbelt violation punishable only by a fine. We hold that it does not. … The Fourth Amendment safeguards "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." In reading the Amendment, we are guided by "the traditional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures afforded by the common law at the time of the framing," since "[a]n examination of the common-law understanding of an officer’s authority to arrest sheds light on the obviously relevant, if not entirely dispositive, consideration of what the Framers of the Amendment might have thought to be reasonable." Thus, the first step here is to assess Atwater’s claim that peace officers’ authority to make warrantless arrests for misdemeanors was restricted at common law (whether "common law" is understood strictly as law judicially derived or, instead, as the whole body of law extant at the time of the framing). Atwater’s specific contention is that "founding-era common-law rules" forbade peace officers to make warrantless misdemeanor arrests except in cases of "breach of the peace," a category she claims was then understood narrowly as covering only those nonfelony offenses "involving or tending toward violence." Although her historical argument is by no means insubstantial, it ultimately fails. … [S]tatements about the common law of warrantless misdemeanor arrest simply are not uniform. Rather, "[a]t common law there is a difference of opinion among the authorities as to whether this right to arrest [without a warrant] extends to all misdemeanors." … The point is that the statutes riddle Atwater’s supposed common-law rule with enough exceptions to unsettle any contention that the law of the mother country would have left the Fourth Amendment’s Framers of a view that it would necessarily have been unreasonable to arrest without warrant for a misdemeanor unaccompanied by real or threatened violence. An examination of specifically American evidence is to the same effect. Neither the history of the framing era nor subsequent legal development indicates that the Fourth Amendment was originally understood, or has traditionally been read, to embrace Atwater’s position. To begin with, Atwater has cited no particular evidence that those who framed and ratified the Fourth Amendment sought to limit peace officers’ warrantless misdemeanor arrest authority to instances of actual breach of the peace, and our own review of the recent and respected compilations of framing-era documentary history has likewise failed to reveal any such design. … What we have here, then, is just the opposite of what we had in Wilson v. Arkansas. There, we emphasized that during the founding era a number of States had "enacted statutes specifically embracing" the common-law knock-and-announce rule; here, by contrast, those very same States passed laws extending warrantless arrest authority to a host of nonviolent misdemeanors, and in so doing acted very much inconsistently with Atwater’s claims about the Fourth Amendment’s object. Of course, the Fourth Amendment did not originally apply to the States, but that does not make state practice irrelevant in unearthing the Amendment’s original meaning. A number of state constitutional search-and-seizure provisions served as models for the Fourth Amendment, and the fact that many of the original States with such constitutional limitations continued to grant their own peace officers broad warrantless misdemeanor arrest authority undermines Atwater’s contention that the founding generation meant to bar federal law enforcement officers from exercising the same authority. … Nor does Atwater’s argument from tradition pick up any steam from the historical record as it has unfolded since the framing, there being no indication that her claimed rule has ever become "woven … into the fabric" of American law. … The story, on the contrary, is of two centuries of uninterrupted (and largely unchallenged) state and federal practice permitting warrantless arrests for misdemeanors not amounting to or involving breach of the peace. … Small wonder, then, that today statutes in all 50 States and the District of Columbia permit warrantless misdemeanor arrests by at least some (if not all) peace officers without requiring any breach of the peace, as do a host of congressional enactments. … While it is true here that history, if not unequivocal, has expressed a decided, majority view that the police need not obtain an arrest warrant merely because a misdemeanor stopped short of violence or a threat of it, Atwater does not wager all on history. Instead, she asks us to mint a new rule of constitutional law on the understanding that when historical practice fails to speak conclusively to a claim grounded on the Fourth Amendment, courts are left to strike a current balance between individual and societal interests by subjecting particular contemporary circumstances to traditional standards of reasonableness. Atwater accordingly argues for a modern arrest rule, one not necessarily requiring violent breach of the peace, but nonetheless forbidding custodial arrest, even upon probable cause, when conviction could not ultimately carry any jail time and when the government shows no compelling need for immediate detention. If we were to derive a rule exclusively to address the uncontested facts of this case, Atwater might well prevail. She was a known and established resident of Lago Vista with no place to hide and no incentive to flee, and common sense says she would almost certainly have buckled up as a condition of driving off with a citation. In her case, the physical incidents of arrest were merely gratuitous humiliations imposed by a police officer who was (at best) exercising extremely poor judgment. Atwater’s claim to live free of pointless indignity and confinement clearly outweighs anything the City can raise against it specific to her case. But we have traditionally recognized that a responsible Fourth Amendment balance is not well served by standards requiring sensitive, case-by-case determinations of government need, lest every discretionary judgment in the field be converted into an occasion for constitutional review. Often enough, the Fourth Amendment has to be applied on the spur (and in the heat) of the moment, and the object in implementing its command of reasonableness is to draw standards sufficiently clear and simple to be applied with a fair prospect of surviving judicial second-guessing months and years after an arrest or search is made. Courts attempting to strike a reasonable Fourth Amendment balance thus credit the government’s side with an essential interest in readily administrable rules. … At first glance, Atwater’s argument may seem to respect the values of clarity and simplicity, so far as she claims that the Fourth Amendment generally forbids warrantless arrests for minor crimes not accompanied by violence or some demonstrable threat of it (whether "minor crime" be defined as a fine-only traffic offense, a fine-only offense more generally, or a misdemeanor). But the claim is not ultimately so simple, nor could it be, for complications arise the moment we begin to think about the possible applications of the several criteria Atwater proposes for drawing a line between minor crimes with limited arrest authority and others not so restricted. One line, she suggests, might be between "jailable" and "fine-only" offenses, between those for which conviction could result in commitment and those for which it could not. The trouble with this distinction, of course, is that an officer on the street might not be able to tell. It is not merely that we cannot expect every police officer to know the details of frequently complex penalty schemes, … but that penalties for ostensibly identical conduct can vary on account of facts difficult (if not impossible) to know at the scene of an arrest. Is this the first offense or is the suspect a repeat offender? Is the weight of the marijuana a gram above or a gram below the fine-only line? Where conduct could implicate more than one criminal prohibition, which one will the district attorney ultimately decide to charge? And so on. But Atwater’s refinements would not end there. She represents that if the line were drawn at nonjailable traffic offenses, her proposed limitation should be qualified by a proviso authorizing warrantless arrests where "necessary for enforcement of the traffic laws or when [an] offense would otherwise continue and pose a danger to others on the road." … The proviso only compounds the difficulties. Would, for instance, either exception apply to speeding? At oral argument, Atwater’s counsel said that "it would not be reasonable to arrest a driver for speeding unless the speeding rose to the level of reckless driving." But is it not fair to expect that the chronic speeder will speed again despite a citation in his pocket, and should that not qualify as showing that the "offense would … continue" under Atwater’s rule? And why, as a constitutional matter, should we assume that only reckless driving will "pose a danger to others on the road" while speeding will not? There is no need for more examples to show that Atwater’s general rule and limiting proviso promise very little in the way of administrability. It is no answer that the police routinely make judgments on grounds like risk of immediate repetition; they surely do and should. But there is a world of difference between making that judgment in choosing between the discretionary leniency of a summons in place of a clearly lawful arrest, and making the same judgment when the question is the lawfulness of the warrantless arrest itself. … Just how easily the costs could outweigh the benefits may be shown by asking, as one Member of this Court did at oral argument, "how bad the problem is out there." The very fact that the law has never jelled the way Atwater would have it leads one to wonder whether warrantless misdemeanor arrests need constitutional attention, and there is cause to think the answer is no. … The upshot of all these influences, combined with the good sense (and, failing that, the political accountability) of most local lawmakers and law-enforcement officials, is a dearth of horribles demanding redress. … Accordingly, we confirm today what our prior cases have intimated: the standard of probable cause "applie[s] to all arrests, without the need to ‘balance’ the interests and circumstances involved in particular situations." If an officer has probable cause to believe that an individual has committed even a very minor criminal offense in his presence, he may, without violating the Fourth Amendment, arrest the offender. … The Court of Appeals’s en banc judgment is affirmed. It is so ordered.
JUSTICE O'CONNOR, with whom JUSTICE STEVENS, JUSTICE GINSBURG, and JUSTICE BREYER join, dissenting. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be free from "unreasonable searches and seizures." The Court recognizes that the arrest of Gail Atwater was a "pointless indignity" that served no discernible state interest, and yet holds that her arrest was constitutionally permissible. Because the Court’s position is inconsistent with the explicit guarantee of the Fourth Amendment, I dissent. A full custodial arrest, such as the one to which Ms. Atwater was subjected, is the quintessential seizure. … When a full custodial arrest is effected without a warrant, the plain language of the Fourth Amendment requires that the arrest be reasonable. … The majority gives a brief nod to this bedrock principle of our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and even acknowledges that "Atwater’s claim to live free of pointless indignity and confinement clearly outweighs anything the City can raise against it specific to her case." But instead of remedying this imbalance, the majority allows itself to be swayed by the worry that "every discretionary judgment in the field [will] be converted into an occasion for constitutional review.". It therefore mints a new rule that "[i]f an officer has probable cause to believe that an individual has committed even a very minor criminal offense in his presence, he may, without violating the Fourth Amendment, arrest the offender." This rule is not only unsupported by our precedent, but runs contrary to the principles that lie at the core of the Fourth Amendment. As the majority tacitly acknowledges, we have never considered the precise question presented here, namely, the constitutionality of a warrantless arrest for an offense punishable only by fine. … A custodial arrest exacts an obvious toll on an individual’s liberty and privacy, even when the period of custody is relatively brief. The arrestee is subject to a full search of her person and confiscation of her possessions. If the arrestee is the occupant of a car, the entire passenger compartment of the car, including packages therein, is subject to search as well. The arrestee may be detained for up to 48 hours without having a magistrate determine whether there in fact was probable cause for the arrest. Because people arrested for all types of violent and nonviolent offenses may be housed together awaiting such review, this detention period is potentially dangerous. And once the period of custody is over, the fact of the arrest is a permanent part of the public record. We have said that "the penalty that may attach to any particular offense seems to provide the clearest and most consistent indication of the State’s interest in arresting individuals suspected of committing that offense." If the State has decided that a fine, and not imprisonment, is the appropriate punishment for an offense, the State’s interest in taking a person suspected of committing that offense into custody is surely limited, at best. This is not to say that the State will never have such an interest. A full custodial arrest may on occasion vindicate legitimate state interests, even if the crime is punishable only by fine. Arrest is the surest way to abate criminal conduct. It may also allow the police to verify the offender’s identity and, if the offender poses a flight risk, to ensure her appearance at trial. But when such considerations are not present, a citation or summons may serve the State’s remaining law enforcement interests every bit as effectively as an arrest. … Because a full custodial arrest is such a severe intrusion on an individual’s liberty, its reasonableness hinges on "the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests." In light of the availability of citations to promote a State’s interests when a fine-only offense has been committed, I cannot concur in a rule which deems a full custodial arrest to be reasonable in every circumstance. Giving police officers constitutional carte blanche to effect an arrest whenever there is probable cause to believe a fine-only misdemeanor has been committed is irreconcilable with the Fourth Amendment’s command that seizures be reasonable. Instead, I would require that when there is probable cause to believe that a fine-only offense has been committed, the police officer should issue a citation unless the officer is "able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant [the additional] intrusion" of a full custodial arrest. The majority insists that a bright-line rule focused on probable cause is necessary to vindicate the State’s interest in easily administrable law enforcement rules. … While clarity is certainly a value worthy of consideration in our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, it by no means trumps the values of liberty and privacy at the heart of the Amendment’s protections. … The record in this case makes it abundantly clear that Ms. Atwater’s arrest was constitutionally unreasonable. … There is no question that Officer Turek’s actions severely infringed Atwater’s liberty and privacy. … The Court’s error, however, does not merely affect the disposition of this case. The per se rule that the Court creates has potentially serious consequences for the everyday lives of Americans. A broad range of conduct falls into the category of fine-only misdemeanors. … To be sure, such laws are valid and wise exercises of the States’ power to protect the public health and welfare. My concern lies not with the decision to enact or enforce these laws, but rather with the manner in which they may be enforced. Under today’s holding, when a police officer has probable cause to believe that a fine-only misdemeanor offense has occurred, that officer may stop the suspect, issue a citation, and let the person continue on her way. … Although the Fourth Amendment expressly requires that the latter course be a reasonable and proportional response to the circumstances of the offense, the majority gives officers unfettered discretion to choose that course without articulating a single reason why such action is appropriate. Such unbounded discretion carries with it grave potential for abuse. The majority takes comfort in the lack of evidence of "an epidemic of unnecessary minor-offense arrests." But the relatively small number of published cases dealing with such arrests proves little and should provide little solace. Indeed, as the recent debate over racial profiling demonstrates all too clearly, a relatively minor traffic infraction may often serve as an excuse for stopping and harassing an individual. After today, the arsenal available to any officer extends to a full arrest and the searches permissible concomitant to that arrest. An officer’s subjective motivations for making a traffic stop are not relevant considerations in determining the reasonableness of the stop. But it is precisely because these motivations are beyond our purview that we must vigilantly ensure that officers’ poststop actions–which are properly within our reach–comport with the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of reasonableness. The Court neglects the Fourth Amendment’s express command in the name of administrative ease. In so doing, it cloaks the pointless indignity that Gail Atwater suffered with the mantle of reasonableness. I respectfully dissent. Hunt v. Cromartie (This case may be read in connection with Chapter Five.) 69 U.S.L.W. 4234, 121 S.Ct. 1452, 149 L.Ed. 2d 430 (2001) http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-1864.ZS.html This case is one of only a few surviving examples each term of that part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction that falls into the "appeal" (or obligatory), as opposed to the certiorari (or discretionary), category. Cases involving voting rights disputes are among the handful of cases today that are decided by a panel of three-judges at the district court level (in this instance, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina). Review of such a decision goes directly to the Supreme Court, by-passing a court of appeals. The facts of this case are contained in Justice Breyer’s opinion below. The case is a continuation of legal challenges to North Carolina’s congressional districts that resulted in Shaw v. Reno in 1993 (reprinted on pages 220-225 in the 13th edition of American Constitutional Law). This 2001 decision is significant because it demonstrates how a state legislature may create a majority-minority district in a way that withstands an attack on equal protection grounds. Note that the voting alignment in this case is like that in Shaw v. Reno and Miller v. Johnson (reprinted on pages 226-229), except for Justice O’Connor’s pairing with the Shaw and Miller dissenters. Majority: Breyer, Ginsburg, O’Connor, Souter, Stevens. Dissenting: Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist, Scalia. JUSTICE BREYER delivered the opinion of the Court. In this appeal, we review a three-judge District Court’s determination that North Carolina’s legislature used race as the "predominant factor" in drawing its 12th Congressional District’s 1997 boundaries. The court’s findings, in our view, are clearly erroneous. We therefore reverse its conclusion that the State violated the Equal Protection Clause. This "racial districting" litigation is before us for the fourth time. Our first two holdings addressed North Carolina’s former Congressional District 12, one of two North Carolina congressional districts drawn in 1992 that contained a majority of African-American voters. See Shaw v. Reno (1993) (Shaw I); Shaw v. Hunt (1996) (Shaw II). … Our third holding focused on a new District 12, the boundaries of which the legislature had redrawn in 1997. A three-judge District Court, with one judge dissenting, had granted summary judgment in favor of those challenging the district’s boundaries. The court found that the legislature again had "used criteria . . . that are facially race driven," in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. … This Court reversed. We agreed with the District Court that the new district’s shape, the way in which it split towns and counties, and its heavily African-American voting population all helped the plaintiffs’ case. But neither that evidence by itself, nor when coupled with the evidence of Democratic registration, was sufficient to show, on summary judgment, the unconstitutional race-based objective that plaintiffs claimed. That is because there was a genuine issue of material fact as to whether the evidence also was consistent with a constitutional political objective, namely, the creation of a safe Democratic seat. … On remand, the … three-judge District Court … again held (over a dissent) that the legislature had unconstitutionally drawn District 12’s new 1997 boundaries. It found that the legislature had tried "(1) [to] cur[e] the [previous district’s] constitutional defects" while also "(2) drawing the plan to maintain the existing partisan balance in the State’s congressional delegation." It added that to "achieve the second goal," the legislature "drew the new plan (1) to avoid placing two incumbents in the same district and (2) to preserve the partisan core of the existing districts." The court concluded that the "plan as enacted largely reflects these directives." But the court also found "as a matter of fact that the General Assembly . . . used criteria . . . that are facially race driven" without any compelling justification for doing so. … We noted probable jurisdiction. And we now reverse. The issue in this case is evidentiary. We must determine whether there is adequate support for the District Court’s key findings, particularly the ultimate finding that the legislature’s motive was predominantly racial, not political. In making this determination, we are aware that, under Shaw I and later cases, the burden of proof on the plaintiffs (who attack the district) is a "demanding one." The Court has specified that those who claim that a legislature has improperly used race as a criterion, in order, for example, to create a majority-minority district, must show at a minimum that the "legislature subordinated traditional race-neutral districting principles . . . to racial considerations." … The Court also has made clear that the underlying districting decision is one that ordinarily falls within a legislature’s sphere of competence. Hence, the legislature "must have discretion to exercise the political judgment necessary to balance competing interests," ibid., and courts must "exercise extraordinary caution in adjudicating claims that a State has drawn district lines on the basis of race" (emphasis added). Caution is especially appropriate in this case, where the State has articulated a legitimate political explanation for its districting decision, and the voting population is one in which race and political affiliation are highly correlated. … The critical District Court determination–the matter for which we remanded this litigation–consists of the finding that race rather than politics predominantly explains District 12’s 1997 boundaries. … The District Court primarily based its "race, not politics," conclusion upon its finding that "the legislators excluded many heavily-Democratic precincts from District 12, even when those precincts immediately border the Twelfth and would have established a far more compact district." … This finding, however … rests solely upon evidence that the legislature excluded heavily white precincts with high Democratic Party registration, while including heavily African-American precincts with equivalent, or lower, Democratic Party registration. Indeed, the District Court cites at length figures showing that the legislature included "several precincts with racial compositions of 40 to 100 percent African-American," while excluding certain adjacent precincts "with less than 35 percent African-American population" but which contain between 54% and 76% registered Democrats. As we said before, the problem with this evidence is that it focuses upon party registration, not upon voting behavior. And we previously found the same evidence … inadequate because registration figures do not accurately predict preference at the polls. … A legislature trying to secure a safe Democratic seat is interested in Democratic voting behavior. Hence, a legislature may, by placing reliable Democratic precincts within a district without regard to race, end up with a district containing more heavily African-American precincts, but the reasons would be political rather than racial. … We concede the record contains a modicum of evidence offering support for the District Court’s conclusion. … The evidence taken together, however, does not show that racial considerations predo
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