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State v. Boyea12/1/2000
cted Justices of that Court.
Prior to Terry, the Court had recognized that the "Fourth Amendment's proper function is to constrain, not against all intrusions as such, but against intrusions which are not justified in the circumstances, or which are made in an improper manner." Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 768 (1966). The Court echoed Schmerber in Terry when it wrote, " f course, the specific content and incidents of this right must be shaped by the context in which it is asserted. For 'what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.'" Terry, 392 U.S. at 9 (quoting Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206, 222 (1960)).
To answer the question "what would the Court do in this case?" we need to examine what it has found to be "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment and why, and to review how it has handled other cases in which the basis of the officer's suspicion comes not from personal observation but rather from an informant's tip.
Terry is the seminal case in the area and the logical place to start. There, an officer found the behaviors of two men to be suspicious, testifying that "they didn't look right to me at the time." 392 U.S. at 5. The officer observed the men as they repeatedly took turns walking a short distance down the street and looking into a store window. The officer suspected they were "casing a job, a stick-up." Id. at 6. Eventually, the officer approached them, asked their names, received a mumbled response, grabbed Terry, spun him around and patted down the outside of his clothing for weapons. A gun was recovered and Terry was charged with carrying a concealed weapon.
The Court began its analysis in Terry by identifying the "central inquiry under the Fourth Amendment - the reasonableness in all the circumstances of the particular governmental invasion of a citizen's personal security." Id. at 19. " ould the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or search 'warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief' that the action taken was appropriate?" Id. at 21-22. It found that the officer was discharging a legitimate investigative function when he approached Terry and his companions after viewing their suspicious behavior. "It would have been poor police work indeed for an officer of 30 years' experience in the detection of thievery from stores in this same neighborhood to have failed to investigate this behavior further." Id. at 23.
The Court emphasized, however, that the propriety of the stop was not the crux of the case. Rather, it was the officer's "invasion of Terry's personal security by searching him for weapons in the course of that investigation." Id. The Court's analysis of the frisk focused on the safety of law enforcement officers in their daily interactions with suspected criminals and ordinary citizens, remarking: "American criminals have a long tradition of armed violence, and every year in this country many law enforcement officers are killed in the line of duty, and thousands more are wounded." Id. The Court found no offense to the Fourth Amendment when the officer took necessary measures to determine if the men were in fact carrying weapons.
Thus, from Terry we take the test of whether the officer's action was justified at its inception, and whether it was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place, recognizing that we deal in this case not with a search, but only with a limited seizure, a brief investigatory detention of a vehicle on a public highway. See Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444, 451 (1990) (level of intrusion of brief roadside sobriety chec
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Vermont DUI Attorneys
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