\u3ci\u3eHeien\u3c/i\u3e\u27s Mistake of Law

The Supreme Court has been whittling away at the Fourth Amendment for decades. The Court\u27s 2014 ruling in Heien v. North Carolina allowing the police to make a traffic stop based on a reasonable mistake of law generated little controversy among the Justices and escaped largely unnoticed by the press-perhaps because yet another Supreme Court decision reading the Fourth Amendment narrowly is not especially noteworthy or because the opinion\u27s cursory and overly simplistic analysis equating law enforcement\u27s reasonable mistakes of fact and law minimized the significance of the Court\u27s decision. But the temptation to dismiss Heien as just another small chink in the Fourth Amendment\u27s armor ought to be resisted. The Court\u27s ruling substantially expands police officers\u27 already broad discretion to make traffic stops, including pretextual ones, to now include circumstances where no violation of law even occurred. Drawing on both criminal procedure jurisprudence and the criminal law literature discussing mistake of law, this Article begins with a critique of the Court\u27s reasoning in Heien. The Article then addresses the potential reach of the Court\u27s ruling. Examining the lower courts\u27 application of Heien in the eighteen months after it was decided, the Article points out that the decision can be read broadly to forgive a wide variety of reasonable police mistakes of law. Even more problematic, the cumulative impact of Heien and some of the Supreme Court\u27s other recent Fourth Amendment opinions could potentially lead courts to tolerate even unreasonable mistakes law enforcement officials make in interpreting the law. The Article concludes that, if the Fourth Amendment is construed to allow any mistakes of law, it should borrow from criminal law and ignore police officers\u27 legal errors only when they relied on an official interpretation of the law made by an independent, authoritative third party. Affording the police broader leeway to act based on their own misunderstandings of law is unjustifiable and threatens to further fuel the growing tensions between law enforcement and communities of color