Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday accused the Supreme Court majority of overstepping its role to “wordsmith” the lower court in Washington, D.C., in a pointed break from his colleagues on the Fourth Amendment case of whether a police officer has reasonable suspicion to stop a person.
Jackson, a Biden appointee, was the lone justice to defend the D.C. Court of Appeals, which found last year that the officer had improperly stopped the man while he was in the vehicle. The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court by 7-2 and decided to stop the police. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee and the high court’s most senior liberal justice, also broke with the majority but declined to join Jackson’s dissent, which isolated Jackson as an outlier among the liberal justices.
The Supreme Court’s decision emphasized that police officers have broad ability to rely on the “totality of the circumstances,” sometimes trivial standalone facts about a situation that can be combined with more suspicious behavior to justify reasonable suspicion for a police stop or arrest.
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attends the Essence of Culture Festival on July 5, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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But Jackson, she said, is an interference by the high court in a lower court’s routine assessment of what facts are relevant and what are not.
Jackson wrote, “I cannot understand why this court would need to correct this kind of statistical determination.”
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The case stemmed from a suspicious vehicle reporting call to Washington, D.C., police in 2023. When an officer arrived on the scene, two men ran from the car while the remaining occupants slowly made their way out of the parking lot with the door open. The D.C. Attorney General’s Office argued on behalf of the police that this “totality” of facts constituted reasonable suspicion to stop the occupant of the car.
The Supreme Court’s unsigned per curiam opinion said the lower court improperly ignored the fact that two men fled the vehicle before a third man was stopped by an officer. Jackson said the D.C. Court of Appeals did a basic “calling” of the facts to conclude that the stop was unreasonable.
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Justices pose for their official group portrait at the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on October 7, 2022.
“Under these circumstances, with only seconds to decide whether to intervene, the officer was perfectly justified in detaining the driver,” the police’s lawyers argued.
They added that “moments after stopping the driver, the officer noticed a broken window and a punched-out ignition, which confirmed the vehicle was stolen.”
While Jackson is known for aggressively supporting court intervention in broader constitutional battles involving presidential power, in this case, his dissent emphasized the need for judicial restraint.
The Supreme Court decision emphasized that police officers have broad discretion to rely on the “totality of the circumstances” when making a stop.
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Jackson argued that the lower court properly considered the Fourth Amendment, which states that people “have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects.” She said the case did not merit the “unusual step of summary reversal.”
“I don’t know why our court would see fit to intervene in this matter, let alone do so summarily,” Jackson said. “If the intervention reflects a concern that the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (DCCA) misconstrues the Fourth Amendment’s totality-of-the-circumstances analysis, that concern appears unfounded.”
Original article source: The court jumped into a routine police-stop case after Jackson lashed out at co-workers during a single disagreement
