Supreme Court sidesteps case about race in police encounters

The Supreme Court declined to review whether judges may consider race-related factors when deciding if a person reasonably felt free to leave a police encounter. The dispute traces back to a 2020 search in Washington, D.C., where a stolen gun was found after o

On a Washington, D.C., sidewalk in 2020, Donte Carter was approached during a police search for illegal firearms. Officers did not have a specific reason to stop him, according to the record. They asked if he had a gun—and when he was pressed to “hike his pants,” a .40-caliber pistol was found.

That gun had been stolen from an FBI agent’s car two months earlier.

Carter was later convicted. but the case turned on a question that reached the Supreme Court: can race-related factors be used to decide whether someone felt free to walk away from a police encounter?. On June 22. the Supreme Court declined to take up the issue. leaving a lower-court approach in place without resolving the broader constitutional fight.

Two conservative justices said they would have heard the appeal. Justice Samuel Alito, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, argued it is dangerous to treat people differently based on statistics or expert testimony about how racial groups are allegedly more likely to behave.

“It is dangerous to allow an individual to be treated differently based on statistics. studies. or expert testimony that purports to show that members of the racial or ethnic group to which he belongs are more likely to act in a certain way than are members of other groups. ” Alito wrote. “Here, the special treatment helped the individual; in other situations it will not.”.

The Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to intervene. saying the lower court’s “race specific approach” was both unworkable and wrong. Lawyers for the department said the Constitution does not permit “judicial presumptions about how people of a particular race think. ” arguing that such presumptions cannot be mandated or tolerated.

Carter’s attorneys pressed for a different view. They argued that race was not the only factor the lower court considered and said race can be permissible in determining how a reasonable person would have experienced the encounter.

“Courts must consider all the circumstances of a police encounter to determine whether a reasonable person would have felt free to end the encounter and walk away,” Carter’s lawyers wrote. “Race can play a valid role in that inquiry.”

The dispute sits inside Fourth Amendment rules. The Fourth Amendment requires police to have reasonable suspicion or probable cause before conducting a search or a “seizure.” But even without formal detention. courts also weigh whether a person was effectively prevented from leaving—often by asking whether most people in that situation would believe they had a choice.

In Carter’s case, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals said the question was a close call. One of the factors tipping the balance was Carter’s race and what the court described as “generalized lived experiences.”

The appellate court said Black Americans “are disproportionately likely to be victims of violence at the hands of police officers. particularly during suspicionless investigatory inquiries like the one here.” It also pointed to how many Black parents. the court said. tell their children “the talk” about how to act around law enforcement.

“The court ruled” that the historical features of “blue-on-black interaction” that shape this fear were present in Carter’s encounter. The court said that understanding made clear that Carter’s apprehension wasn’t hypothetical.

In the end. the Supreme Court declined to decide whether those considerations—race-linked fears and experience-based assumptions tied to encounters—can be used when assessing whether someone was free to leave. The justices’ disagreement. with Alito and Thomas calling for review and the others stepping away. keeps the underlying legal tension alive: how courts weigh a person’s sense of choice against the constitutional demand for neutral. fact-based policing.

Supreme Court police encounters race Fourth Amendment Donte Carter Fourth Amendment seizure reasonable person Justice Department Samuel Alito Clarence Thomas