Year: 1983
Type: article
Abstract: Thirty years ago police stopped Malcolm X because he was a black man in a white neighborhood.'A revolution in civil rights later, police still view race as an important factor in the decision to detain a suspect.The facts behind the recent Supreme Court case of Kolender v. Lawson = 2 are instructive: During a two-year period, Edward Lawson, a law-abiding black citizen with a penchant for strolling through white neighborhoods, was detained or arrested fifteen times under a California statute requiring "suspicious" persons to identify themselves to a policeman's satisfaction.Even more disturbing than this persistent discrimination is the limited and ambivalent response it has evoked from the courts.The judicial reaction to other disquieting indicia of suspicion, such as youth, a "hippie" appearance, or presence in a "crime-prone" neighborhood, has been similarly disorganized.The Supreme Court has developed a two-tier standard for measuring the legality of a detention: The prosecution must establish "probable cause" to justify a full custodial arrest and it must show "reasonable suspicion" to justify an investigatory stop and frisk.'Both concepts focus on t
Source: The Yale Law Journal
DOI: 10.2307/796306
Author: Sheri Lynn Johnson
Language: English
Topic: Criminal Law and Evidence
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W27169727