[Peace-discuss] Racial Profiling is OK says Supreme Court

[Barbara kessel]

Supreme Court Unanimously OKs Racial Profiling

By Stephen J. Fortunato, Jr., In These Times. Posted May 24, 2008.

A recent ruling obliquely -- but forcefully -- slams the courthouse
door on any attempts to challenge this widespread law enforcement
practice.

Either racial profiling is odious and unconstitutional, with personal
and social consequences for communities of color -- or it's not.

On April 23, the U.S. Supreme Court, without any dissent, decided that
it was not. The ruling obliquely, but forcefully, slammed the
courthouse door on any attempts to challenge this widespread law
enforcement practice.

In the case of Virginia v. Moore, the high court saw no violation of
David Lee Moore's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable
searches and seizures, even though his arrest was the result of a
series of Keystone Cop-like miscues and an outright violation of
Virginia law.

Here's how it played out: On Feb. 20, 2003, police officers received a
radio call that a man known as "Chubs" was operating an automobile on
a suspended license. Apparently, one of the officers knew that David
Lee Moore went by the nickname of "Chubs." The officers pulled over
Moore's vehicle and determined that his license had indeed been
suspended. Under Virginia law, driving with a suspended license is not
an arrestable offense, and the officers were obliged to issue him a
citation for a future court appearance rather than take him into
custody. Disregarding this clear legal mandate, however, the officers
arrested Moore.

They took him to his hotel room where they searched him and found
crack cocaine and $516 in cash.

According to Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion, no search of Moore was
conducted when he was initially stopped because each officer
mistakenly believed that the other had already searched the suspect.
As Scalia noted -- presumably with a straight face -- Moore
"consented" to a search of his person and his room.

What is not mentioned in the Supreme Court opinion -- but what can be
ascertained in lower court decisions, including that of the Virginia
Supreme Court when it reversed Moore's conviction -- was that the
"Chubs" mentioned in the original radio transmission was not Moore but
rather a man named Christopher Delbridge.

Also, one of the police officers explained at the suppression hearing
that they had ignored Virginia law relative to the issuance of
citations in such circumstances because it was "just our prerogative;
we chose to effect an arrest."

But the most important fact in this case -- which was ignored by the
Virginia courts, the Supreme Court and the few media accounts of this
litigation -- is that David Lee Moore is African-American.
(Portsmouth, Va., is a city of slightly more than 100,000 people, more
than 50 percent of whom are black.)

Scalia and his equally myopic and complacent colleagues refuse to
address the problem of racial profiling -- or "driving while black" --
that has been widely discussed in law and political science journals,
as well as reported anecdotally by black males, both ordinary citizens
and those who enjoy professional or political prominence.

The Moore decision mirrors that of another unanimous Scalia opinion
from more than a decade ago, Whren v. United States (1996). In that
case, every member of the high court sitting at that time agreed that
there was no impropriety, constitutional or otherwise, when
plainclothes officers in an unmarked car in Washington, D.C., stopped
two young black men for minor traffic violations in order to search
for drugs. The officers were members of an undercover narcotics unit
and were expressly prohibited by District of Columbia regulations from
making traffic stops unless the driver was somehow threatening public
safety. The court went on to uphold the validity of pretext stops.

Around the country, scholars, lawyers, community activists and even
many progressive law enforcement officers are trying to eliminate the
scourge of racial profiling. But read together, the Moore and Whren
rulings demonstrate the Supreme Court's impatience with municipal and
state efforts designed to circumscribe arbitrary police behavior often
motivated by racial stereotyping.

To see the original version of this article, go here.



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