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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:

A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.

The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.)

Our own BJ Campbell wrote that this is one of the important differences between the US and Western Europe. A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery and physical evidence wouldn't be suppressed even if obtained without following the proper trail of investigation.

Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?

The "free to leave" analysis for whether it was a detention seems awfully hard to square with Florida v. Bostick and United States v. Drayton. A state is free to have stronger protections under the state constitution than the federal one, but a judicial opinion has to make it explicit that the court is relying on the state constitution rather than the federal one per Michigan v. Long, and I don't see the court specifically relying on the Penn. state constitution in that decision (but I didn't check all the cited decisions, so perhaps those do).

That case would be a solid loser for the defense in my state. I have, in fact, lost motions to suppress on very similar fact patterns, and I'm far from the only one (so it's not simply my incompetence).

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