WASHINGTON – In 2020, Donte Carter was standing on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C., when a police officer searching for illegal firearms asked him if he had a gun.
Police had no particular reason to approach Carter. And he could have refused the request to “pull up his pants.” That action led to the discovery of a .40-caliber handgun stolen from an FBI agent’s car two months earlier.
However, the court threw out Carter’s conviction, taking into account that he may have felt compelled to comply because black Americans like him are disproportionately exposed to police violence.
On June 22, the Supreme Court declined to consider the ruling, including whether racial factors cited by lower courts can be used to determine whether a person is free to flee an encounter with police.
The court’s two conservative justices said they would litigate the case.
“It is dangerous to allow individuals to be treated differently based on statistics, studies, and expert testimony purporting to show that members of their racial or ethnic group are more likely to behave in a certain way than members of other groups,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. “Special treatment helped the person here, but not in other situations.”
The Justice Department, which had asked the court to take up the case, said the lower court’s “race-specific approach” was unworkable and wrong.
“The Constitution does not permit, much less require, judicial presumptions about how people of a particular race think,” the department’s lawyers wrote in their unsuccessful appeal.
Carter’s lawyers countered that Carter’s race was not the only factor the lower court considered, saying race is a permissible consideration under a 1980 Supreme Court decision.
“The court must consider all the circumstances of the encounter with police and determine whether a reasonable person could have ended the encounter and left without hesitation,” his attorneys wrote. “Race can play a useful role in that investigation.”
The Fourth Amendment requires police to have reasonable suspicion or probable cause that a person has committed a crime before conducting a search or “seizure.”
When determining whether someone was effectively prevented from leaving the country, even if they were not formally detained, courts consider whether most people in a particular situation believed they had a choice.
In Carter’s case, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals said it was a close call. But one of the factors that contributed to tipping the balance was Carter’s race and “generalized lived experience.”
The court said that black Americans are “disproportionately likely to be victims of police violence, especially during innocent investigations such as this one.”
Because so many black men are killed by police, black parents routinely “talk” to their children about how to evade law enforcement, the court said.
“Applying this understanding of why black men feel particularly anxious in the presence of police, it is clear that many of the historical features of blue-black interaction that led to this perception were present in the encounter with Mr. Carter,” the court ruled.
