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Flowers v US - Unreasonable stop & search


Euler

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21-835 Docket

Petition for Certiorari said:

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In 1963, a police officer observed two men take turns walking up to a store, peering into the window, and returning to confer. After seeing this ritual repeated a dozen times over the course of several minutes, the officer stopped them to investigate. In 2017, an officer observed two men sitting in their parked car outside of an open convenience store for 10 to 15 seconds before six patrol cars descended on them to conduct a "field interview." In the first case, this Court held that reasonable suspicion supported the stop. Terry v. Ohio ... (1968). In the second, the divided Fifth Circuit panel below found that this Court's 1968 precedent justified the same outcome.

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This Court long ago held that an individual's presence in a high-crime area alone "is not enough to support a reasonable, particularized suspicion." Illinois v. Wardlow ... (2000). But in the two decades since Wardlow, lower courts have struggled to define what conduct is enough for reasonable suspicion when a police interaction occurs in a high-crime area. Lacking guidance from this Court, federal and state courts have reached irreconcilable conclusions about whether ambiguous conduct -- i.e., conduct that is fully consistent with lawful behavior, of the type that many law-abiding Americans frequently engage in -- is enough to support reasonable suspicion, merely because that conduct occurs in a high-crime area.

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In seeking to defend the stop, the officer pointed to conduct -- petitioner's decision to linger briefly in his car, which was parked adjacent to an open convenience store's front door -- which is not only fully consistent with innocuous behavior, but of the type that is undertaken every day by scores of law-abiding Americans. But because petitioner was outside a convenience store in a heavily-patrolled urban area, the Fifth Circuit found reasonable suspicion existed to justify the stop.

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Terry's threshold requirement of reasonable suspicion has become a hollow protection if an act that "any law-abiding citizen might do in order to patronize the store" is enough in a high-crime area to justify a seizure.

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Petitioner was indicted on a single charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

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Although the petitioner was a felon, the cop didn't know that until after the stop and search.

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