The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a case that would have forced it to decide whether police officers must factor a suspect's race into Fourth Amendment seizure analysis, and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas warned the decision leaves law enforcement trapped in a constitutionally dangerous guessing game.
The case, U.S. v. Donte J. Carter, arose from a D.C. Court of Appeals ruling that vacated a man's firearm and theft convictions after the lower court held that Carter's race, he is Black, was relevant to whether a reasonable person in his position would have felt free to walk away from a police encounter. The Supreme Court's refusal to take up the case lets that reasoning stand, at least for now.
Alito, writing for himself and Thomas, did not mince words about the consequences. As Fox News reported, the dissent warned that the D.C. court's framework effectively requires officers on the street to make snap racial classifications, and then apply different legal standards depending on the result.
The underlying encounter was straightforward. Police approached Donte J. Carter and asked whether he was carrying a weapon. Carter said no. Officers then asked him to pull his pants up, at which point they noticed an L-shaped bulge. That bulge turned out to be a.40-caliber pistol, one that had been stolen from an FBI agent's vehicle.
Carter was convicted on firearm and theft charges. But the D.C. Court of Appeals reversed those convictions, ruling that the encounter had effectively become a seizure before officers had established reasonable suspicion. The court's reasoning hinged on a striking claim: that Black Americans like Carter are "especially distrustful of law enforcement" and therefore "less likely" than other people "to terminate a police encounter" because of skepticism that any attempt to exercise their constitutional rights would be respected.
In other words, the court held that a Black suspect's race changes the legal calculus of whether he was truly "free to leave", and that this changed calculus meant the stop was unlawful.
Alito's dissent attacked the D.C. court's logic head-on. He wrote:
"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 real weight. Alito was not merely objecting on procedural grounds. He was flagging the inescapable logic of the D.C. court's framework: if race-based generalizations can be used to help a defendant today, they can just as easily be used to harm one tomorrow.
The recent clash between Alito and Justice Jackson over the Louisiana redistricting case showed how deep the Court's internal divisions run on questions of race and law. This dissent underscored the same fault line.
Alito pressed further on the practical absurdity the D.C. standard would impose on officers in the field:
"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? We have said that our '[Constitution is color-blind].' It 'almost never' allows government actors to treat persons differently based on their race."
Think about what that means for a patrol officer at two in the morning. Before deciding how to proceed with a stop, the officer must first classify the person by race, then apply a different legal standard based on that classification. If the person is Black, one set of rules. If Latino, perhaps another. If the officer guesses wrong, the entire encounter could be thrown out in court.
The practical result of the D.C. ruling deserves attention on its own terms. A man caught carrying a stolen firearm, stolen from a federal agent's vehicle, no less, lied to officers about having a weapon, and his convictions were vacated. Not because the evidence was fabricated. Not because the officers used excessive force. But because a court decided that a reasonable Black person would not have felt free to walk away.
The government argued that the D.C. court's reasoning forced police to assume all Black people share the same attitudes toward law enforcement and would feel equally uncomfortable exercising their constitutional rights in an officer's presence. Alito agreed, citing the Supreme Court's own precedent in Shaw v. Reno:
"And we have rejected the proposition that the Constitution permits an individual to be treated 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.'"
That precedent exists for a reason. The entire project of equal protection rests on the principle that the government cannot sort citizens into racial categories and assign them group characteristics. The D.C. court did exactly that, and the Supreme Court, by declining to intervene, left the ruling intact.
The Court's conservative majority has shown no reluctance to correct lower courts when it believes they have strayed. It recently reinstated the Etan Patz murder conviction in a 6-3 ruling that rebuked a federal appeals court for overstepping. It has reversed D.C.-based rulings before. Why it chose to pass on Carter remains unexplained, the Court issued no reasoning for its refusal to grant certiorari.
The D.C. Court of Appeals is not the Supreme Court. Its rulings do not bind courts nationwide. But the reasoning in Carter is now citable precedent within the D.C. circuit, and defense attorneys across the country will notice.
If the framework spreads, if other appellate courts adopt the idea that a suspect's race alters the Fourth Amendment seizure analysis, police departments will face an impossible compliance problem. Officers would need to categorize every person they encounter by race before deciding how to proceed. Training manuals would have to include race-specific protocols. And any misjudgment, any failure to correctly identify a person's racial background and apply the corresponding legal standard, could result in suppressed evidence and vacated convictions.
Alito cited Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Louisiana v. Callais alongside Shaw v. Reno in his dissent, drawing a clear line from the Court's recent affirmative-action and redistricting holdings to the principle at stake in Carter. The logic is consistent: the Constitution does not permit race-based sorting by government actors. The D.C. court's ruling is a direct challenge to that principle.
The Supreme Court still has roughly twenty major opinions pending this term, and the justices have shown a willingness to take on contentious questions. That they passed on this one is notable, and, for officers on the street, potentially consequential.
Strip away the legal jargon and the D.C. court's holding rests on a single premise: that Black Americans, as a group, think and feel a certain way about police. That premise may reflect real sociological data. But enshrining it in constitutional law means treating individuals not as individuals but as representatives of a racial category.
That is precisely the kind of reasoning the Supreme Court has spent decades rejecting in other contexts, from university admissions to legislative redistricting. The Court has already reversed one D.C. ruling on a Fourth Amendment police stop this term, with Justice Jackson standing alone in dissent. The willingness to correct lower courts exists. The question is why it did not extend to Carter.
Only Alito and Thomas dissented from the denial of certiorari. No other justice joined them. The silence from the rest of the bench, including the other conservative justices, is itself a fact worth noting, even if the reasons behind it remain unknown.
Meanwhile, a.40-caliber pistol stolen from an FBI agent sits at the center of a case where the convictions were thrown out. Not because the defendant was innocent. Not because the evidence was tainted. Because a court decided his race changed the rules.
The conservative bloc has not been shy about dismantling flawed lower-court reasoning when it chooses to engage. On Carter, it chose not to. Officers in the D.C. circuit now operate under a standard that requires them to treat suspects differently based on skin color, and call it equal protection.
A colorblind Constitution cannot survive if courts keep handing it a paint chart.
