Kansas v. Glover
Issue: Does a police officer violate the Fourth Amendment by conducting an investigatory traffic stop based on an assumption that the driver of a vehicle is the registered owner of the vehicle?
Holding: No. The reasonable suspicion required to for an investigatory traffic stop exists when, absent information to the contrary, an officer makes a “common sense inference” that the registered owner of a vehicle is also the driver, and the registered owner has a revoked driver’s license.
Facts: Kansas deputy sheriff Mark Mehrer ran the license plate of a truck that he did not observe committing any infraction or engaged in suspicious activity of any kind. After running the plate, Mehrer discovered that a Charles Glover Jr. was the registered owner of the vehicle, and that Glover had a revoked driver’s license. Without confirming the registered owner was the driver, Mehrer initiated an investigatory stop of the vehicle. Glover, who was in fact driving, was charged with driving as a habitual offender. Glover moved to suppress evidence from the traffic stop arguing that Mehrer lacked the requisite reasonable suspicion to initiate the stop, and thus the stop ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment.
Procedural History: The Kansas State trial court granted Glover’s motion to suppress the evidence seized during the stop, finding that Mehrer lacked reasonable suspicion required for the stop. The Kansas Court of Appeals reversed, holding that it was reasonable for Mehrer to assume that the registered owner of the vehicle was also the driver. The Kansas Supreme Court reversed, holding that Mehrer’s inference did not constitute reasonable suspicion. The United States Supreme Court reversed, finding the police officer’s actions constitutional, and remanded.
Court’s Reasoning: The United States Supreme Court began by noting that reasonable suspicion, a “less demanding” standard than probable cause, does not “require scientific certainty,” and permits officers to make “commonsense judgments and inferences about human behavior.” Furthermore, the court emphasized that reasonableness is gauged from the totality of information available to the officer at the time of the stop. Here, the court noted two facts which together provided sufficient reasonable suspicion: the registered owner of a truck observed by Mehrer had a revoked license and there was no evidence available to Mehrer indicating that Glover was not the driver. Stated in the inverse, the rule articulated by the court is that if the registered owner of a vehicle has a revoked license, there is reasonable suspicion to stop the car unless the officer has evidence that the owner is not the driver. The court also supplemented its finding of reasonableness on the part of Mehrer by citing empirical studies demonstrating that drivers with revoked licenses frequently continue to drive.
At the close of the opinion, the court did note the scope of its holding is narrow, and that the reasonableness of a stop could be offset by “the presence of additional facts that might dispel reasonable suspicion.” For example, if the registered owner was an older male and the driver observed was a younger female, that would not “raise a [reasonable] suspicion that the particular individual being stopped is engaged in wrongdoing.”
Dissent – Sotomayor: Justice Sotomayor’s dissent argues that the majority flipped the burden of proof by effectively creating presumptions of facts for which there is not yet proof. She also objected to the majority’s use of empirical data to support its finding of reasonable suspicion, pointing out that statistics fall short of the Fourth Amendment’s “individualized suspicion” requirement and will “pave the road to finding reasonable suspicion based on nothing more than a demographic profile.”
Supreme Court of the United States
April 6, 2020
140 S. Ct. 1183 (2020)
Case No. 18-556