New Law Review Article: Goldilocks and the Fourth Amendment: Why the Supreme Court of North Carolina Missed an Opportunity to Get Officer Mistakes of Law “Just Right” in State v. Heien

John B. Lyman, Goldilocks and the Fourth Amendment: Why the Supreme Court of North Carolina Missed an Opportunity to Get Officer Mistakes of Law “Just Right” in State v. Heien, 92 N.C. L. Rev. 1012 (2014). [Note also that Heien v. North Carolina was noted on SCOTUSBlog as a petition of the day.]

Abstract:

As the saying goes, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Under this maxim, which dates back to Roman law and is familiar among lawyers and laypeople alike, accused persons find little defense in the claim: “I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” The doctrine presumes awareness of legal obligations, and those who do not know their actions are unlawful receive no reprieve from law enforcement officers as a result of their naivety. And for good reason–public policy demands an informed and law-abiding populace and discourages “the easy-to-assert and difficult-to-dispute claim of ignorance that would otherwise flow from the lips of any person facing criminal punishment.”

But what of mistakes of law by those charged with its enforcement? The Supreme Court of North Carolina recently grappled with this issue as a matter of first impression in State v. Heien. In Heien, officers stopped a vehicle on the erroneous belief that its improperly functioning brake light violated the state’s vehicle code. Reversing the North Carolina Court of Appeals, the supreme court held “that so long as an officer’s mistake is reasonable, it may give rise to [the] reasonable suspicion” required to conduct a traffic stop. In so doing, the court rejected the approach taken by the majority of jurisdictions and urged by the three-justice dissent–that an officer’s mistaken understanding of underlying substantive statutory law cannot give rise to the requisite level of suspicion required to sustain a traffic stop. By contrast, a more intermediate position is exemplified by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s holding in United States v. Booker that “[a] stop is lawful despite a mistake of law . . . if an objectively valid basis for the stop nonetheless exists.”

This Recent Development argues that the Supreme Court of North Carolina should have adopted the Booker approach to officers’ mistakes of substantive law when it confronted the issue in Heien. First, the Booker rule is more consistent with prior North Carolina precedent in that it employs a more appropriate “totality of the circumstances” inquiry. Second, the Booker rule is most representative of the balancing test required by the Fourth Amendment –it maintains officer flexibility while still protecting citizens’ constitutional rights. Thus, when tempered by appropriate constraints on post hoc officer claims of independent objective justifications, the intermediate Booker rule is “just right,” and the Supreme Court of North Carolina missed an opportunity to adopt it in State v. Heien.

[Note: Law review articles are screened by Prof. Andrew G. Ferguson, UDC Law School.]