U.S. v. Sokolow
Last updated
Last updated
As students have likely already noticed, a great deal of Fourth Amendment cases result from enforcement of laws banning the possession, manufacture, and sale of certain drugs. Because police spend substantial time on drug enforcement, officers have come to recognize common characteristics and behaviors of persons involved in the drug trade. The next case concerns the relevance of such observations to a finding of reasonable suspicion.
Supreme Court of the United States
United States v. Andrew Sokolow
Decided April 3, 1989 –
Chief Justice REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court.
Respondent Andrew Sokolow was stopped by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents upon his arrival at Honolulu International Airport. The agents found 1,063 grams of cocaine in his carry-on luggage. When respondent was stopped, the agents knew, [among other things], that (1) he paid $2,100 for two airplane tickets from a roll of $20 bills; (2) he traveled under a name that did not match the name under which his telephone number was listed; (3) his original destination was Miami, a source city for illicit drugs; (4) he stayed in Miami for only 48 hours, even though a round-trip flight from Honolulu to Miami takes 20 hours; (5) he appeared nervous during his trip; and (6) he checked none of his luggage. A divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the DEA agents did not have a reasonable suspicion to stop respondent, as required by the Fourth Amendment. We take the contrary view.
This case involves a typical attempt to smuggle drugs through one of the Nation’s airports. On a Sunday in July 1984, respondent went to the United Airlines ticket counter at Honolulu Airport, where he purchased two round-trip tickets for a flight to Miami leaving later that day. The tickets were purchased in the names of “Andrew Kray” and “Janet Norian” and had open return dates. Respondent paid $2,100 for the tickets from a large roll of $20 bills, which appeared to contain a total of $4,000. He also gave the ticket agent his home telephone number. The ticket agent noticed that respondent seemed nervous; he was about 25 years old; he was dressed in a black jumpsuit and wore gold jewelry; and he was accompanied by a woman, who turned out to be Janet Norian. Neither respondent nor his companion checked any of their four pieces of luggage.
After the couple left for their flight, the ticket agent informed Officer John McCarthy of the Honolulu Police Department of respondent’s cash purchase of tickets to Miami. Officer McCarthy determined that the telephone number respondent gave to the ticket agent was subscribed to a “Karl Herman,” who resided at 348-A Royal Hawaiian Avenue in Honolulu. Unbeknownst to McCarthy (and later to the DEA agents), respondent was Herman’s roommate. The ticket agent identified respondent’s voice on the answering machine at Herman’s number. Officer McCarthy was unable to find any listing under the name “Andrew Kray” in Hawaii. McCarthy subsequently learned that return reservations from Miami to Honolulu had been made in the names of Kray and Norian, with their arrival scheduled for July 25, three days after respondent and his companion had left. He also learned that Kray and Norian were scheduled to make stopovers in Denver and Los Angeles.
On July 25, during the stopover in Los Angeles, DEA agents identified respondent. He “appeared to be very nervous and was looking all around the waiting area.” Later that day, at 6:30 p.m., respondent and Norian arrived in Honolulu. As before, they had not checked their luggage. Respondent was still wearing a black jumpsuit and gold jewelry. The couple proceeded directly to the street and tried to hail a cab, where Agent Richard Kempshall and three other DEA agents approached them. Kempshall displayed his credentials, grabbed respondent by the arm, and moved him back onto the sidewalk. Kempshall asked respondent for his airline ticket and identification; respondent said that he had neither. He told the agents that his name was “Sokolow,” but that he was traveling under his mother’s maiden name, “Kray.”
Respondent and Norian were escorted to the DEA office at the airport. There, the couple’s luggage was examined by “Donker,” a narcotics detector dog, which alerted on respondent’s brown shoulder bag. The agents arrested respondent. He was advised of his constitutional rights and declined to make any statements. The agents obtained a warrant to search the shoulder bag. They found no illicit drugs, but the bag did contain several suspicious documents indicating respondent’s involvement in drug trafficking. The agents had Donker reexamine the remaining luggage, and this time the dog alerted on a medium-sized Louis Vuitton bag. By now, it was 9:30 p.m., too late for the agents to obtain a second warrant. They allowed respondent to leave for the night, but kept his luggage. The next morning, after a second dog confirmed Donker’s alert, the agents obtained a warrant and found 1,063 grams of cocaine inside the bag.
Respondent was indicted for possession with the intent to distribute cocaine. The United States District Court for Hawaii denied his motion to suppress the cocaine and other evidence seized from his luggage. Respondent then entered a conditional plea of guilty to the offense charged.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed respondent’s conviction by a divided vote. We granted certiorari to review the decision of the Court of Appeals. We now reverse.
The Court of Appeals held that the DEA agents seized respondent when they grabbed him by the arm and moved him back onto the sidewalk. The Government does not challenge that conclusion, and we assume—without deciding—that a stop occurred here. Our decision, then, turns on whether the agents had a reasonable suspicion that respondent was engaged in wrongdoing when they encountered him on the sidewalk.
The concept of reasonable suspicion, like probable cause, is not “readily, or even usefully, reduced to a neat set of legal rules.” We think the Court of Appeals’ effort to refine and elaborate the requirements of “reasonable suspicion” in this case creates unnecessary difficulty in dealing with one of the relatively simple concepts embodied in the Fourth Amendment. In evaluating the validity of a stop such as this, we must consider “the totality of the circumstances—the whole picture.”
The rule enunciated by the Court of Appeals, in which evidence available to an officer is divided into evidence of “ongoing criminal behavior,” on the one hand, and “probabilistic” evidence, on the other, is not in keeping with the [] statements from our decisions. It also seems to us to draw a sharp line between types of evidence, the probative value of which varies only in degree. The Court of Appeals classified evidence of traveling under an alias, or evidence that the suspect took an evasive or erratic path through an airport, as meeting the test for showing “ongoing criminal activity.” But certainly instances are conceivable in which traveling under an alias would not reflect ongoing criminal activity: for example, a person who wished to travel to a hospital or clinic for an operation and wished to conceal that fact. One taking an evasive path through an airport might be seeking to avoid a confrontation with an angry acquaintance or with a creditor. This is not to say that each of these types of evidence is not highly probative, but they do not have the sort of ironclad significance attributed to them by the Court of Appeals.
On the other hand, the factors in this case that the Court of Appeals treated as merely “probabilistic” also have probative significance. Paying $2,100 in cash for two airplane tickets is out of the ordinary, and it is even more out of the ordinary to pay that sum from a roll of $20 bills containing nearly twice that amount of cash. Most business travelers, we feel confident, purchase airline tickets by credit card or check so as to have a record for tax or business purposes, and few vacationers carry with them thousands of dollars in $20 bills. We also think the agents had a reasonable ground to believe that respondent was traveling under an alias; the evidence was by no means conclusive, but it was sufficient to warrant consideration. While a trip from Honolulu to Miami, standing alone, is not a cause for any sort of suspicion, here there was more: surely few residents of Honolulu travel from that city for 20 hours to spend 48 hours in Miami during the month of July. Any one of these factors is not by itself proof of any illegal conduct and is quite consistent with innocent travel. But we think taken together they amount to reasonable suspicion.
We do not agree with respondent that our analysis is somehow changed by the agents’ belief that his behavior was consistent with one of the DEA’s “drug courier profiles.” A court sitting to determine the existence of reasonable suspicion must require the agent to articulate the factors leading to that conclusion, but the fact that these factors may be set forth in a “profile” does not somehow detract from their evidentiary significance as seen by a trained agent.
We hold that the agents had a reasonable basis to suspect that respondent was transporting illegal drugs on these facts. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is therefore reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with our decision.
Justice MARSHALL, with whom Justice BRENNAN joins, dissenting.
Because the strongest advocates of Fourth Amendment rights are frequently criminals, it is easy to forget that our interpretations of such rights apply to the innocent and the guilty alike. In the present case, the chain of events set in motion when respondent Andrew Sokolow was stopped by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents at Honolulu International Airport led to the discovery of cocaine and, ultimately, to Sokolow’s conviction for drug trafficking. But in sustaining this conviction on the ground that the agents reasonably suspected Sokolow of ongoing criminal activity, the Court diminishes the rights of all citizens “to be secure in their persons,” as they traverse the Nation’s airports. Finding this result constitutionally impermissible, I dissent.
The Fourth Amendment cabins government’s authority to intrude on personal privacy and security by requiring that searches and seizures usually be supported by a showing of probable cause. The reasonable suspicion standard is a derivation of the probable cause command, applicable only to those brief detentions which fall short of being full-scale searches and seizures and which are necessitated by law enforcement exigencies such as the need to stop ongoing crimes, to prevent imminent crimes, and to protect law enforcement officers in highly charged situations. By requiring reasonable suspicion as a prerequisite to such seizures, the Fourth Amendment protects innocent persons from being subjected to “overbearing or harassing” police conduct carried out solely on the basis of imprecise stereotypes of what criminals look like, or on the basis of irrelevant personal characteristics such as race.
To deter such egregious police behavior, we have held that a suspicion is not reasonable unless officers have based it on “specific and articulable facts.” It is not enough to suspect that an individual has committed crimes in the past, harbors unconsummated criminal designs, or has the propensity to commit crimes. On the contrary, before detaining an individual, law enforcement officers must reasonably suspect that he is engaged in, or poised to commit, a criminal act at that moment.
In my view, a law enforcement officer’s mechanistic application of a formula of personal and behavioral traits in deciding whom to detain can only dull the officer’s ability and determination to make sensitive and fact-specific inferences “in light of his experience.” Reflexive reliance on a profile of drug courier characteristics runs a far greater risk than does ordinary, case-by-case police work of subjecting innocent individuals to unwarranted police harassment and detention. This risk is enhanced by the profile’s “chameleon-like way of adapting to any particular set of observations.” In asserting that it is not “somehow” relevant that the agents who stopped Sokolow did so in reliance on a prefabricated profile of criminal characteristics, the majority thus ducks serious issues relating to a questionable law enforcement practice, to address the validity of which we granted certiorari in this case.
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