Terry v. Ohio – FYS 100 – 34: The Rights of the Criminally Accused

Officer Terry McFadden, a 39 year old police veteran, was patrolling the streets as he saw two men doing what he thought was planning to rob a store. The two men would walk back in forth in front of the store then they met with a third man a block away. When McFadden approached them, identifying himself as a police officer and asking the three for identification, one of the men gave a mumbled response after whispering to the group. The officer then quickly turned him around and patted him down finding a handgun. McFadden also searched the other men and found another gun. The men were arrested on concealed weapon charges.

In an 8-1 decision in the court, the court decided that this was a constitutional search and that the officer acted reasonably. Justice Warren cited that the fourth Amendment protects people, not places, and that the amendment upholds the reasonable expectation of privacy. Except in this situation the officer had enough reasonable suspicion that the suspect could have been armed and dangerous because of the way he was acting. In this situation I agree with the courts decision, as the suspects could have posed a threat to the officers in that they possessed weapons, but this “stop and frisk” is not always the answer.

If anyone has been keeping up with the presidential race they may have heard of this “stop and frisk” come up in the first presidential debate. Posed with the question of healing racial divides in America, Trump proposed his method of “law and order” and the possibility of bringing back stop and frisk to cities with high-crime rates. A show on the Wall Street Journal, here (5 mins), analyzed the constitutionality of stop and frisk and even cited the Terry v. Ohio case. WSJ said that the idea of stop and frisk is constitutional but the way it was being used was not as it was being used disproportionally against racial minorities. The show then goes on to talk about the effectiveness of stop and frisk citing how 88% of the searches in New York City found nothing and that the crime rates in NYC have been going down but that might not be the effect of stop and frisk as rates have also been going down nationally.