Article from Reason by Damon Root.
Assume the following: You are a licensed driver, age 17. You live with your father. His driver’s license has been suspended. He hands you the keys to his car and asks you to run an errand. While driving to do that errand you are stopped by the police and subjected to roadside questioning. You have not broken a single law. The only reason why the police stopped you is because they guessed that your father might be driving. Was the traffic stop lawful? Or did it violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures?
The above scenario is hypothetical but the questions it raises are genuine. In its October 2019 term, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that asks whether the Fourth Amendment “always permits a police officer to seize a motorist when the only thing the police officer knows is that the motorist is driving a vehicle registered to someone whose license has been revoked.”
The case is Kansas v. Glover. In 2016, a patrolling sheriff’s deputy ran the plates on a Chevrolet pickup truck and learned that the truck’s owner, Charles Glover, had a revoked driver’s license. The deputy had no idea if Glover was actually behind the wheel. But the deputy still pulled the truck over on the assumption that Glover was driving. He was. Now Glover wants the Supreme Court to rule the stop unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
“When a driver loses his license, he and his family must rely on other drivers (a spouse, a driving-age child, a child-care provider, a neighbor) to meet the family’s needs,” Glover and his lawyers point out in their brief to the Supreme Court. “Under Kansas’s proposed rule…any of those other drivers can be pulled to the side of the road at any moment merely for driving a lawfully registered and insured car in a completely lawful manner.” That rule, they argue, is an “unjustified intrusion on personal privacy” that violates the Fourth Amendment.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit:Â Joe Ravi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
wpDiscuz
Clearly a violation of the 4th!
The violation was the IDIOT driving. It happens every single day. OH. I forgot that is his First Amendment right to comment as many crimes and traffic violations as he wants. Is that correct Dale Brown that he does not have to follow the laws?
Are you REALLY that STUPID???
I can see a reasonable question to stop the vehicle and ascertained who is in controat the time. If it is the offender then case made and no problem. If, however, the driver is fully licensed to operate the vehicle then the operator should be allowed to proceed with, No Harm, No foul and not further interaction need be done. It should not come into question as to whether or not the operator has
a CCW from another state and a weapon might or might not be in the vehicle.
If no crime has not been committed then the officer does not have the right
to violate the rights of a citizen unless a crime has been committed. By the same
token in today’s society we have criminals operating vehicles and transportation
illicit material from one place to another for criminal intent such as drugs. Still
you have to have probable cause to proceed beyond a simple stop.
I am not a fan of big brother and stopping people just to FIND violations, license plates, driver’s license, should not be the focus of law enforcement. In fact, I believe that we should focus more on prevention than waiting for things to happen. People that have just been released from jail. Violent offenders and their whereabouts, mentally ill folks. In fact our jails shouldn’t be warehouses AND inmates should have to work – hard. Many criminals are simply lazy and don’t want to have to work so they steal, sell drugs, rob folks. We could include any number of government employees, agencies, and corporate executives who belong in this group.