Ketanji Brown Jackson accuses Supreme Court of overstepping in police case

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the Supreme Court majority on Monday of overstepping its role to “wordsmith” a lower court in Washington, D.C., in a pointed break from her colleagues in a Fourth Amendment case about whether a police officer had reasonable suspicion to stop a man.

Jackson, a Biden appointee, was the lone justice to defend the D.C. appeals court, which had found last year that the officer improperly stopped the man while he was in a vehicle. The Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s decision 8-2, approving the police stop. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee and the high court’s most senior liberal justice, also broke with the majority but declined to join Jackson’s dissent, further isolating Jackson as an outlier even among the liberal justices.

The Supreme Court’s decision emphasized that police officers have the broad ability to rely on a “totality of the circumstances” when making stops, noting that sometimes seemingly trivial standalone facts about a situation can be combined with more suspicious behavior to justify reasonable suspicion for a police stop or arrest.

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But Jackson argued against what she said was the high court’s intervention in a lower court’s routine evaluation of which facts are relevant and which are not.

“I cannot fathom why that kind of factbound determination warranted correction by this Court,” Jackson wrote.

The case arose from a 2023 dispatch call to Washington, D.C., police at 2 a.m. reporting a suspicious vehicle. When an officer arrived on scene, two people ran from the car while the remaining passenger slowly began backing out of the parking lot with a door still open. The D.C. attorney general’s office argued on behalf of police that this “totality” of facts amounted to reasonable suspicion to stop the person who remained in the car.

The Supreme Court’s unsigned per curiam opinion said the lower court improperly ignored that two people fled the vehicle before the third person was stopped by an officer. Jackson said the D.C. appeals court had done basic “culling” of facts to reach its conclusion that the stop was unwarranted.

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“Under these circumstances, with only seconds to decide whether to intervene, the officer was entirely justified in detaining the driver,” lawyers for the police argued.

They added that “within moments of stopping the driver, the officer observed a smashed window and punched-out ignition, confirming that the vehicle had been stolen.”

While Jackson has become known for aggressively supporting court intervention in broader constitutional fights involving presidential power, in this case, her dissent emphasized a need for judicial restraint.

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Jackson argued that the lower court properly considered the Fourth Amendment, which says people have a right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” She said the case was not worthy of taking the “unusual step of summary reversal.”

“I am not sure why our Court sees fit to intervene in this case, let alone to do so summarily,” Jackson said. “If the intervention reflects a worry that the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (DCCA) misunderstands the Fourth Amendment’s totality-of-the-circumstances analysis, that worry seems unfounded.”