holding that police officers' observations of Taylor, a black suspect, walking nervously and quickly through the airport were racially-biased and insufficient to justify a search and seizure
How later courts described this case
- holding that police officers' observations of Taylor, a black suspect, walking nervously and quickly through the airport were racially-biased and insufficient to justify a search and seizure
- defendant was seized when, after being approached by three officers after leaving an airline terminal, he was pulled back by one of the officers and asked a barrage of questions that he felt compelled to answer
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
MERRITT, Chief Judge,
concurring
I concur in the Court’s conclusions about this case. I particularly agree that law enforcement agents cannot make a racial characteristic the predominant feature in the drug courier profile. Like the Court I can find no real basis for distinguishing this man from the other passengers who deplaned, except for race.
But I would reach the result even if race did not seem to be the overriding reason for the officer’s intervention. Prior to obtaining any evidence whatever that could establish “probable cause,” Officer Eldridge arrested Taylor. Eldridge candidly admitted as much when he testified: Taylor was not in fact free to leave. All of the signs and circumstances of the sidewalk confrontation point in the same direction. Thus prior to finding any evidence of a crime, Taylor was “seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. It was not a brief Terry stop to make inquiry. It was an illegal arrest.
The seizure of the contraband was a direct consequence of the illegal arrest. One need not necessarily debate the question of whether the opening of the bag was consensual at the moment Taylor unzipped it. In the larger sense it was coerced because it was the fruit of an unlawful arrest, and so the search was also unlawful.
Under our current law, there is no escape from the conclusion that the contraband must be suppressed. Constitutional rules protecting individual privacy and freedom from unreasonable governmental restraint apply to police officers as well as courts, and the officer's unnecessarily precipitous and coercive action in violation of these rules, unfortunately, has defeated his ease.