This term, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments on October 6, 2014. The first case, Heien v North Carolina, presents a pretty cool criminal law issue; it considers whether a police officer’s mistaken understanding of the law can be a valid basis for making a traffic stop.
Facts of the case
In order to stop a vehicle, a police officer only needs objectively reasonable suspicion of some criminal or traffic violation. In April of 2009, a North Carolina police officer became suspicious of Nicholas Heien when he saw him in a car with one of the two brake lights broken. In fact, the car was legal since an arcane North Carolina law only requires a single functioning “stop lamp.” The cop mistakenly thought that both lights had to be working and because of this mistake, the officer made a stop and detained Heien.
After stopping the car the officer got Heien’s consent to search it and found a plastic bag containing cocaine. Heien was charged with drug trafficking and moved the trial judge to exclude the cocaine since there was no legal basis to stop the car. The trial judge denied the motion and so Heien pled guilty to drug trafficking while preserving his right to appeal. He was sentenced to 20-24 months in prison. The first appeals court reversed the trial judge holding that the stop was no good. But the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed holding that, so long as officer’s mistake of law is reasonable, it can justify a traffic stop. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
How will the court rule?
The court has already carved out exceptions for stops based on a reasonable mistake of fact so if the police think they see an expired inspection sticker, the stop is valid even if it turns out the sticker was good. But a mistake of law seems fundamentally different: The constitutional question has always been to measure the information the officer reasonably believed against true law of the land and to see if there was an objectively reasonable justification for the stop. To allow police to measure their observations against a mistaken understanding of the law seems pretty crazy. As the dissenters on the North Carolina Supreme Court said:
Proper enforcement of the law requires accurate knowledge of the law…to decide otherwise is to endorse the fundamental unfairness of holding citizens to the traditional rule that ignorance of the law is no excuse while allowing those entrusted to enforce the law to be ignorant of it.
