Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas on Monday dissented from the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up a case that they said forces police officers to create a separate set of rules for racial minorities."It is dangerous to allow an individual to be treated differently based on statistics, studies, or expert testimony that purports to show that members of the racial or ethnic group to which he belongs are more likely to act in a certain way than are members of other groups," Alito wrote on behalf of himself and Thomas."Here, the special treatment helped the individual; in other situations it will not."The case, U.S.
v.Donte J.
Carter, involved a Black man whose firearm and theft convictions were vacated after the D.C.Court of Appeals held that police seized him before they had reasonable suspicion.
Officers later recovered a .40-caliber pistol from Carter’s pants and the government said the gun had been stolen from an FBI agent’s vehicle.According to the D.C.court, "black Americans like [Carter] are ‘especially distrustful of law enforcement’" and therefore "‘less likely’ than other people ‘to terminate a police encounter’ due to skepticism that any attempt to exercise their constitutional rights will be respected." SUPREME COURT REJECTS BOSTON PARENTS' APPEAL CLAIMING RACIAL BIAS IN AN ADMISSIONS POLICYSupreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are pictured together.
(Getty Images)The D.C.court reasoned that Carter’s race was relevant to whether a reasonable person in his position would have felt free to end the police encounter.
It ruled that the encounter effectively became a seizure, and that such an action was unlawful because police officers hadn’t established reasonable suspicion before subjecting him to it.Alito and Thomas argued that the D.C.ruling effectively forces law enforcement to treat people differently based on their race, something precedent established by the Supreme Court prohibits."Under the test, off...