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A Court Just Ruled That Cops Can't Stop-and-Frisk You--if They Suspect a Gun - Elie Mystal @ The Nation
The Nation (Archived)The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is well known as the most extremist Republican court in the entire country. The circuit oversees Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and it’s a big reason those states consistently lead the nation in bigotry and cruelty. The Fifth Circuit is so reactionary that even the extremist Republicans on the Supreme Court have tried to rein it in. This past term, the Supreme Court heard 13 cases from the Fifth Circuit, and reversed the circuit in 10 of them.
The occasional rebukes do not slow the circuit’s roll, however. It is home to a number of judges—Stuart Kyle Duncan, James Ho, and Andy Oldham, to name a few—who see themselves as Supreme Court justices some day. And those guys know that the way to get promoted in Federalist Society and MAGA judicial circles is to keep throwing out insane legal theories and bigoted opinions until the white-wing supremacy machine recognizes their contributions.
Indeed, I try not to write about Fifth Circuit opinions very much, because I know that, when people like me get angry at what they’re doing, it reads as those judges “owning the libs,” and that’s the only currency that matters in MAGAland. But they dropped an opinion last week that is so drenched in violent, racist hypocrisy that I can’t ignore it.
The Fifth Circuit announced that the cops cannot stop and frisk a person if they suspect you have a gun, but made it pretty clear that they can still stop and frisk you for existing while Black. Reading it made me feel like I had ingested a hallucinogen and was having a very bad trip into white-boy Wonderland.
The case is called US v. Wilson and it involves the stop-and-frisk of a Louisiana man named Damion Wilson. (Neither the judicial record, nor basic Google searches, reveal Wilson’s race. I’m going to assume he’s Black, but your mileage may vary.) Wilson was stopped by Deputy US Marshal Michael Atkins after Atkins observed “a bulge in [Wilson’s] waist.” Atkins believed it to be a “hard object”… like, perhaps, a gun.
The occasional rebukes do not slow the circuit’s roll, however. It is home to a number of judges—Stuart Kyle Duncan, James Ho, and Andy Oldham, to name a few—who see themselves as Supreme Court justices some day. And those guys know that the way to get promoted in Federalist Society and MAGA judicial circles is to keep throwing out insane legal theories and bigoted opinions until the white-wing supremacy machine recognizes their contributions.
Indeed, I try not to write about Fifth Circuit opinions very much, because I know that, when people like me get angry at what they’re doing, it reads as those judges “owning the libs,” and that’s the only currency that matters in MAGAland. But they dropped an opinion last week that is so drenched in violent, racist hypocrisy that I can’t ignore it.
The Fifth Circuit announced that the cops cannot stop and frisk a person if they suspect you have a gun, but made it pretty clear that they can still stop and frisk you for existing while Black. Reading it made me feel like I had ingested a hallucinogen and was having a very bad trip into white-boy Wonderland.
The case is called US v. Wilson and it involves the stop-and-frisk of a Louisiana man named Damion Wilson. (Neither the judicial record, nor basic Google searches, reveal Wilson’s race. I’m going to assume he’s Black, but your mileage may vary.) Wilson was stopped by Deputy US Marshal Michael Atkins after Atkins observed “a bulge in [Wilson’s] waist.” Atkins believed it to be a “hard object”… like, perhaps, a gun.
Increasingly difficult to argue with this conclusion. www.thenation.com/article/soci...
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) 2025-07-24T16:23:24.245Z