Police Under the Gun

Back in 1968, Justice William O. Douglas warned in a dissenting opinion in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, that the Court was opening a Pandora\u27s box by eschewing the traditional probable cause standard for Fourth Amendment search and seizures in traffic stop cases, and permitting warrantless detentions based merely on reasonable suspicion. More than a quarter-century later, the confusion over the reasonable suspicion approach is still commanding the Supreme Court\u27s attention. A pair of cases on the justices\u27 argument calendar this spring address the tension between legitimate traffic stops and those based on pretext