Terry v. Ohio

On October 31, 1963, Detective Martin McFadden was in plain clothes, patrolling his downtown beat in Cleveland, Ohio, an area that he had been patrolling for shoplifters and pick-pocketing the last 30 years. At 2:30 PM, he noticed two unknown individuals, John Terry and Richard Chilton acting suspiciously, standing on a street corner. One of the men walked away and stopped to look in a nearby store window, continued walking, and on the way back stopped to look in the same store window before rejoining the other man. After a short conversation between the two, the second man traced the exact steps of the first, examining the same store window. The two men repeated this sequence five to six times, each. While the two men were talking with one another, a third man named Carl Katz joined them. After a brief discussion, Katz quickly left, and was then joined again by Terry and Chilton. By now, Officer McFadden suspected these men of planning a stickup and decided to approach them. He identified himself as a law enforcement officer and asked them their names. When the men responded only by “mumbling something,” Officer McFadden grabbed Terry, turned him around to face the other two men and patted the outside of his clothing. Once McFadden felt a handgun in Terry’s coat pocket, and commanded them into the store. He removed Terry’s coat, removed a revolver and patted down the outer clothing of the two other men and found another gun on Chilton’s coat pocket. Officer McFadden did not remove anything from Katz, and did not search his pockets since he did not feel anything in his pat down. McFadden did not search Chilton or Terry’s coats until he felt the guns. Upon being taken into police custody, Terry and Chilton were charged with carrying concealed weapons. John Terry claimed that Officer McFadden did not have probable cause to stop and frisk them. He purposed that McFadden should have needed evidence to show probable cause that the men were planning to