COLORING IN THE FOURTH AMENDMENT.

UNITED States. Constitution. 4th Amendment ; UNITED States. Supreme Court

For decades, a question has simmered in criminal procedure: Can the Fourth Amendment seizure analysis account for a suspect’s race? Scholars have long advocated for courts to consider race when resolving Fourth Amendment questions, but to date, the Supreme Court has not provided a definitive answer. The question has now bubbled to the surface. With calls for advocates to raise race when litigating Fourth Amendment questions, and with more and more advocates heeding those calls, courts are being asked to contemplate how race factors into deciding whether a person has been seized. When the question is explicitly asked, courts have answered differently, with many refusing to consider race as part of the seizure analysis. It is easy to think that it is only a matter of time before the Supreme Court holds that race has no place in the Fourth Amendment, especially given its muscular articulation of colorblindness in the recent affirmative action cases. Indeed, the lower courts that have held that race cannot be considered as part of a seizure analysis have couched their decisions in the same rhetoric and reasoning found in the Supreme Court’s colorblind rulings. As this Article explains, when scrutinized, colorblind constitutionalism is an illogical fit for the Fourth Amendment. In fact, the analytical underpinnings of colorblindness are consistent with race being considered as part of the seizure free-to-leave analysis. That race can be relevant to a seizure is reinforced when considered against the broader backdrop of Fourth Amendment law and all of the many ways it implicitly and explicitly recognizes race. This Article therefore clarifies that it is permissible to consider the racial identity of the Fourth Amendment’s “reasonable person.” But the insights of this Article extend beyond the Fourth Amendment, because at bottom, it is a warning against “case law creep” — where case law is imported from one context to another to advance a specific ideological mission without interrogating whether the case law supports the cause in that context. It is a reminder that the law should not be an unyielding wrecking ball that swings from jurisprudence to jurisprudence, smashing any hope of progress. Thus, ultimately, this Article seeds hope that the law can catch up to our pluralistic society and learn to recognize a multitude of experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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