The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a case that could force police officers across the country to factor a suspect's race into routine street encounters, and two justices made clear they believe the lower court's reasoning is a constitutional time bomb.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the Court's decision not to take up U.S. v. Donte J. Carter, a Fourth Amendment case out of the D.C. Court of Appeals. At stake is whether an officer's assessment of a police encounter, specifically, whether a person felt free to walk away, must now vary based on the individual's race.
The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that it must. And by declining to intervene, the remaining seven justices left that precedent standing, at least for now.
The facts of the underlying case are straightforward. Officers approached Donte J. Carter, a Black man, and asked whether he was carrying a weapon. Carter said no. When officers asked him to pull up his pants, they noticed an L-shaped bulge, later identified as a.40-caliber pistol stolen from an FBI agent's vehicle.
Carter was convicted on firearm and theft charges. But the D.C. Court of Appeals vacated both convictions, ruling that police had effectively seized Carter before they had reasonable suspicion to do so. The court held that the encounter became a seizure earlier than it would have for a person of a different race, because, in the court's view, Black Americans are "especially distrustful of law enforcement" and therefore "less likely" than other people "to terminate a police encounter."
In other words, the court said Carter's race meant a reasonable person in his position would not have felt free to leave, and that changed the constitutional math.
Alito, writing for himself and Thomas, did not hold back about the implications. As Fox News reported, the dissent warned that the D.C. court's framework injects racial generalizations into the heart of Fourth Amendment analysis.
"It is dangerous to allow an individual to be treated differently based on statistics, studies, or expert testimony that purports to show that members of the racial or ethnic group to which he belongs are more likely to act in a certain way than are members of other groups. Here, the special treatment helped the individual; in other situations it will not."
That last line carries the weight of the entire argument. A legal test built on racial assumptions can cut both ways. Today it benefits a defendant. Tomorrow it could be used to justify more aggressive policing of a different group, all under the same logic.
Alito cited three prior Supreme Court decisions to anchor his objection: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Louisiana v. Callais, and Shaw v. Reno. Each stands for the principle that the government cannot sort individuals by race and assign them group characteristics. As the Supreme Court lets race-based policing standard stand, the tension between those precedents and the D.C. ruling remains unresolved.
Alito's dissent also raised a question that no appellate court has answered cleanly: how is a patrol officer supposed to apply this test in real time?
"Under the test, officers will need to quickly assess a person's race, and if officers and courts must craft special rules for black persons, what about dark-skinned Latinos, other Latinos, and members of other minority groups?"
That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a genuine operational problem. If the legal standard for when a police encounter becomes a "seizure" depends on the race of the person being questioned, officers must make snap racial classifications before deciding how to proceed. The D.C. court's ruling offers no guidance on where those lines fall, or how an officer is supposed to draw them without engaging in the very racial profiling that civil-rights law was designed to prevent.
The U.S. government, as the petitioning party, argued exactly this point: the lower court's reasoning forces police to assume that all Black people share the same attitudes toward law enforcement and would feel unable to exercise their constitutional rights in an officer's presence. That is a sweeping generalization dressed up as sensitivity.
Alito invoked Shaw v. Reno to reject it directly, writing that the Court has already turned aside the idea that the Constitution permits treating someone differently based on "a perception that members of the same racial group, regardless of their age, education, economic status, or the community in which they live, think alike."
The Supreme Court offered no written explanation for declining to hear the case. That is standard procedure when certiorari is denied, but the silence is notable given the strength of Alito's objections and the novelty of the D.C. court's reasoning. Only Alito and Thomas voted to take the case.
The practical result: Carter's firearm and theft convictions remain vacated. A man caught lying to police while carrying a stolen FBI weapon walks free, not because the evidence was weak, but because a court decided his race changed the legal meaning of a sidewalk conversation.
The D.C. Court of Appeals ruling now stands as precedent within its jurisdiction. Whether other circuits adopt similar reasoning, or reject it, remains an open question. With the Supreme Court still facing a heavy docket this term, the justices may yet confront the issue in a different case. But for now, the race-based reasonable-person test is the law in the nation's capital.
For decades, civil-rights advocates fought to remove race from policing decisions. The goal was a system where officers treated every citizen the same, where the color of your skin did not determine how the law applied to you. The D.C. Court of Appeals has now mandated the opposite: officers must consider race, and courts must weigh it, when deciding whether a police encounter crossed a constitutional line.
Alito framed this as a betrayal of the colorblind principle embedded in the Constitution itself. "We have said that our 'Constitution is color-blind,'" he wrote. "It 'almost never' allows government actors to treat persons differently based on their race."
That principle has come under sustained pressure in recent years. Alito has clashed with fellow justices over race-conscious legal standards in redistricting and other contexts. The Carter case extends that debate into criminal law, where the stakes for individual liberty and public safety are highest.
The government's brief made the downstream consequences plain. If courts must apply different seizure standards based on a suspect's race, then the legality of any given police encounter depends not on what the officer did, but on what racial group the suspect belongs to. Two people approached in the same way, on the same street, at the same time, could have different constitutional protections, solely because of skin color.
That is not equal protection. It is its negation.
Lost in the legal abstraction is what officers actually found: a.40-caliber pistol, stolen from a federal agent's vehicle, concealed in Carter's pants, after Carter lied about carrying a weapon. Those facts were never disputed. The evidence was not fabricated, coerced, or tainted by misconduct. The D.C. court simply decided the encounter that produced the evidence started too soon, because a Black man would not have felt free to walk away.
Whether that assumption is sociologically defensible is beside the constitutional point. The Fourth Amendment's reasonable-person standard was designed to be objective, not calibrated to group identity. Alito has faced setbacks on the Court before, but his warning here targets a principle that could reshape policing far beyond Washington.
If officers must now guess how a person's race affects their perception of a police encounter, and guess correctly, or risk having convictions thrown out, the incentive structure is clear. Engage less. Ask fewer questions. Let more stolen weapons stay concealed.
That is not justice. It is a legal framework that treats racial stereotyping as constitutional analysis, and expects cops to play along.
When the Constitution stops being colorblind, everyone loses. The Court has shown it can reach consensus on difficult questions. On this one, seven justices chose to look away. Alito and Thomas, at least, had the clarity to say so.
