Supreme Court Case Of Terry Stops
Law enforcement officers in the United States often perform “Terry stops”, as part of the work routinely associated with police patrol. In policing the term “Terry Stops” which refers to the “stop and frisk” practice, was coined in 1968, and derives from the Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1(1968) . In that landmark case, it was ruled that the Fourth Amendment constitutional right, made applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, that prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” of individuals by American government agents, is not violated, when police officers detain, for a short period time an individual whom they reasonably believe to be committing, have committed or about to commit a criminal activity.
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Terry, Richard Chilton, and Carl Katz were observed by detective Martin McFadden, a plainclothes Cleveland Police Department policeman. Based on his many years of experience in the police forces, the officer believed that these men were "casing a job, a stick-up", thus he decided to stop and pat down the three men’s outer clothing, upon which he recovered a revolver in Terry’s overcoat pocket and another one in Chilton's outside clothing, upon which both men were charged, convicted and sentenced to a three-year imprisonment for carrying a concealed weapon. Terry’s and Chilton’s defense counsel who had unsuccessfully tried to have the case dismissed at trial on grounds that the seizure (and the subsequent search) were a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, vainly appealed both men’s conviction to an intermediate appellate court first, then to the Ohio State Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal invoking "no substantial constitutional question" involvement, and thus the case made its way to the United States Supreme …show more content…
Reasonable Suspicion, an intermediate level of suspicion that is less than probable cause, but more than a simple “hunch”, inarticulate suspicion or “gut feeling” is the standard of justification needed to support a legal Terry stop, when probable cause does not yet exist to arrest. In other words, "the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that
Terry, Richard Chilton, and Carl Katz were observed by detective Martin McFadden, a plainclothes Cleveland Police Department policeman. Based on his many years of experience in the police forces, the officer believed that these men were "casing a job, a stick-up", thus he decided to stop and pat down the three men’s outer clothing, upon which he recovered a revolver in Terry’s overcoat pocket and another one in Chilton's outside clothing, upon which both men were charged, convicted and sentenced to a three-year imprisonment for carrying a concealed weapon. Terry’s and Chilton’s defense counsel who had unsuccessfully tried to have the case dismissed at trial on grounds that the seizure (and the subsequent search) were a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, vainly appealed both men’s conviction to an intermediate appellate court first, then to the Ohio State Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal invoking "no substantial constitutional question" involvement, and thus the case made its way to the United States Supreme …show more content…
Reasonable Suspicion, an intermediate level of suspicion that is less than probable cause, but more than a simple “hunch”, inarticulate suspicion or “gut feeling” is the standard of justification needed to support a legal Terry stop, when probable cause does not yet exist to arrest. In other words, "the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that