The unanimous ruling was based on the justices’ “intuitive conclusion,” in the words of the opinion’s author, Justice David H. Souter, that passengers in a car stopped by the police do not feel free to get out and walk away.
Consequently, Justice Souter said, a police stop results in a “seizure” of the passengers no less than of the driver. It is a basic principle of constitutional law that only a person who has been “seized” through official action can challenge that action as a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure.
The court’s decision reopened the appeal of a California man, Bruce E. Brendlin, who was a passenger in a car that the police stopped, ostensibly to check whether the registration had expired. The state later conceded that the stop was invalid because the police officers knew, from an encounter earlier that day, that the registration was in order.
Upon stopping the car, one of the officers recognized Mr. Brendlin as a parole violator and arrested him. A search revealed methamphetamine supplies. Mr. Brendlin pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison, but argued on appeal that the evidence should be suppressed as the result of the unlawful stop.
The California Supreme Court, overturning a lower state court that had ruled in his favor, held that Mr. Brendlin was not entitled to seek suppression. The state court said that he was not the target of the stop and that until the officer recognized and arrested him, he had not been “seized.”
The California Supreme Court’s analysis was an anomaly, as Justice Souter noted in his opinion; every federal appeals court to address the issue, as well as 47 state courts, had concluded that the police “seize” all the occupants of a car when they stop it.
While the decision, Brendlin v. California, No. 06-8120, therefore did not change the law in most jurisdictions, it did demonstrate an atypical moment of unanimity for the court in a case concerning the rights of criminal defendants.
Nearly half the decisions so far this term in cases concerning criminal procedure or habeas corpus, 9 out of 20 decisions, have been by 5-to-4 votes. In another six, the court voted 9 to 0, although the justices were not necessarily unanimous in their reasoning.
The court’s polarization is revealed by individual voting patterns. In the 14 cases with divided votes, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted 12 times for the prosecution side. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted for that side in 13 of the 14 divided cases. On the other side of the court, Justice John Paul Stevens, arguably the most liberal justice, voted for the defendant in 11 of the 14 divided cases.
The outcome of the latest case was foreshadowed during the argument in April, when one justice after another appeared to share the view that being stopped by the police was not a benign or casual experience for anyone in the car, whether driver or passenger. “The heart rate went up, the blood pressure went up,” Justice Souter, a former New Hampshire attorney general, mused aloud.
In the opinion, he wrote: “A traffic stop necessarily curtails the travel a passenger has chosen just as much as it halts the driver.” He added, “No passenger would feel free to leave.”
Martin S. Pinales, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, called the decision “a victory for common sense.”
The decision may not, however, be of much help to many passengers, whose success in suppressing incriminating evidence will depend on demonstrating that the stop was improper. But the court has given the police great leeway in stopping cars, ruling for example that a stop is valid as long as there is some objective reason for it, such as a broken tail light, regardless of whether the officer might have had an invalid motive, such as racial profiling.
It is not clear whether, as a parole violator, Mr. Brendlin will succeed in his effort to suppress the evidence. The justices left that question to the California courts.
Looking beyond this case, Justice Souter said that the inability of passengers to challenge arbitrary traffic stops gave the police “a powerful incentive” to run “roving patrols.”
In other action on Monday, the court turned down an appeal filed by six prisoners on Alabama’s death row who challenged the state’s refusal to provide lawyers for inmates who have been sentenced to death for a second round of appeals, known as state post-conviction review. Alabama, which has the country’s fastest-growing death row, is the only state that does not provide counsel at this stage, a state-court version of federal habeas corpus at which a convicted defendant can challenge the constitutionality of a trial or sentence.
The inmates lost their case in the federal appeals court in Atlanta. Their Supreme Court appeal, Barbour v. Allen, No. 06-10605, was supported by a brief filed by former justices of the Alabama Supreme Court and former presidents of the state bar association. The brief said Alabama’s refusal to provide lawyers had put the state’s legal system “in a state of crisis” and made Supreme Court review “imperative.”