In Lone Dissent, Justice Sotomayor Blasts Majority Opinion: 'No Foundation in Fact or Logic'

[unblock]

14. presumably you're making wildly different assumptions,

in the case at hand, the police had no particular reason to believe a crime had been committed, no particular reason to believe the driver and the owner were one and the same.

if they had presented evidence in court showing that driving without a suspended license is rampant in that jurisdiction, or that of all the times they pull over a car (for other, legitimate reasons) where the owner of the car has a suspended license, then 95+% of the time the driver is the owner, well *that* might be a good basis for reasonable suspicion.

but they didn't present anything like that. so, legally, it's just an officer's hunch, which is *not* enough for "reasonable suspicion".

or at least, it wasn't prior to this decision....


even hollywood usually gets this one right, in all those police shows, they just "know" the guy's guilty, but they know they need "probably cause". of course, in tv shows, they usually invent probably cause, but at least they know that a police officer's hunch is not enough.


to address you edit: do you really know how often the driver of a car whose owner has a suspended license is actually the owner and not a friend or relative? i don't. i suppose i wouldn't be surprised if your guess is correct, it may even be the vast majority of the time. but why didn't they present this argument? because they didn't run any kind of study like that, which means they were just guessing. that used to be not good enough.