The Supreme Court slaps the D.C. Court of Appeals
by Charles Stimson · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Most state courts of appeals labor under the watchful gaze of a higher authority. Their opinions are not final words, but drafts subject to the red pen of a supreme court and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court.
In this system, error is not just possible. It is expected, and correction is part of the process. In the District of Columbia, a curious anomaly persists. The court of appeals, the city’s highest court, operates largely free from such scrutiny. Its decisions are often the last word. The result: a sense of judicial immunity that breeds, if not arrogance, then at least a comfortable insularity.
The composition of the D.C. bench is no accident. For decades, Republican presidents — perhaps distracted by larger matters of state, perhaps content to defer — have ceded the selection of judges for the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to the local Judicial Nominating Commission.
This well-intentioned act of federalism has yielded a court that leans reliably left of center, a fact that shapes the city’s criminal jurisprudence in profound ways.
In a city where most criminal appeals end at this court’s doorstep, the ideological tilt of its judges is not just an academic curiosity; it is the practical law of the land.
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals’ independence might be admirable were it not for the persistent divergence of its criminal law decisions from the Supreme Court’s own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the court’s approach to the Fourth Amendment.
On questions such as “reasonable articulable suspicion” and “constructive possession” of drugs and guns, the court has charted a course all its own — one that often raises the bar for prosecutors far higher than their counterparts in other states or in federal court.
The result is a criminal justice system in the nation’s capital that is, paradoxically, both more progressive and, at times, less predictable than those in neighboring states.
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All this came to a head in the Supreme Court’s recent, quietly seismic per curiam decision in District of Columbia v. R.W.
Decided on April 20, the case began as a routine prosecution: A police officer received a radio dispatch directing him to check out a suspicious vehicle at an address. The officer arrived at the address at 2 a.m. As he turned his marked vehicle into the parking lot, he saw two people immediately flee the car, leaving the back door open.
R.W., the driver of the vehicle, began to back out of the parking space, at which point the uniformed officer parked his car behind R.W., got out of his police cruiser, ordered R.W. to get out of the car with his hands up and drew his service weapon.
R.W. was charged with several felonies. At trial, his defense filed a motion to suppress the evidence obtained from the car. The judge denied the motion. After he was convicted, R.W. appealed, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed the denial of the motion to suppress and reversed his conviction, holding that the officer lacked reasonable suspicion.
They removed from their analysis both the radio dispatch and the conduct of R.W.’s companions.
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The Supreme Court had none of it. In a brisk but pointed opinion, the justices reversed the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Its message was clear: “Reasonable suspicion depends on the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men (emphasis original), not legal technicians, act.”
On the facts of the case, the high court held that the officer “clearly had reasonable suspicion to stop R.W.”
The facts that were pertinent to the court included the late-night dispatch, the companions’ flight from R.W.’s vehicle, the fact that R.W. drove backward with an open door and his attempt to drive away.
The court noted the obvious. It was R.W.’s “own actions — combined with the panicked flight of his companions [that] strongly suggested that he was [like them] engaged in unlawful conduct he wished to hide from the police.”
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As if to drive home the basic point, the court wrote that “the totality-of-the-circumstances test, however, precludes this sort of divide-and-conquer analysis.” The District of Columbia Court of Appeals’ approach “reveals the perils of reviewing facts piecemeal and without context.”
Instead, as the Supreme Court reminded the D.C. court, “the Fourth Amendment requires … that a Court slosh its way through a factbound morass.” There is no “easy-to-apply legal test or on/off switch in this context.”
For too long, the D.C. court has operated as if insulated from oversight, free to develop its own brand of constitutional law. District of Columbia v. R.W. is a reminder that even the most independent courts are not above correction and that fidelity to Supreme Court precedent is not optional, but essential.
In a city that prides itself on being the seat of American justice, that lesson could not be timelier — or more necessary.
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• Charles “Cully” Stimson is a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the acting director of its Institute for Constitutional Government.