For reasonable suspicion the standard is objective reasonableness. Here, the defendant argued subjective intent two ways: embracing it and rejecting it. United States v. Duggan, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 206037 (D.S.C. Oct. 20, 2025)*:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
6 In one breath, Defendant argues that subjective intent, such as Morrow’s courtesy of waiting for Tisdale to locate proof of insurance to avoid a citation, is irrelevant, while also chastising Morrow for his subjective belief that Tisdale and Defendant had drugs in the car. Compare (ECF No. 79, p. 2) (“An officer’s subjective intent-whether courteous or not-does not alter our constitutional protections. The test is objective reasonableness, not benevolence.”) with (ECF No. 51, p. 6) (“This ‘fishing expedition’ was because the officer-based on his own words-believed drugs were in the car.”). Defendant cannot wield Morrow’s subjective thoughts as both a sword and a shield. The law on this point is clear: Courts, when considering a Fourth Amendment challenge, are constrained to focus on objective reasonableness to the exclusion of any subjective intent. Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 813 (1996)(“[T]hese cases foreclose any argument that the constitutional reasonableness of traffic stops depends on the actual motivations of the individual officers involved\u2026. Subjective intentions play no role in ordinary, probable-cause Fourth Amendment analysis.”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For reasonable suspicion the standard is objective reasonableness. Here, the defendant argued subjective intent two ways: embracing it and rejecting it. United States v. Duggan, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 206037 (D.S.C. Oct. 20, 2025)*:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reasonable-suspicion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62168,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62167\/revisions\/62168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}