Summary of the decision: Heien v. North Carolina
December 17, 2014
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On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in Heien v. North Carolina, our first SCOTUS in the Classroom case. The Court ruled that a search is not necessarily unconstitutional when it is based on a mistaken understanding of a law. Nicholas Heien was pulled over for a broken brake light and then consented to a police search of his car, which turned up contraband. The law in North Carolina actually allowed motorists to have only one working brake light, so the officer was mistaken when he pulled Heien over. Heien argued that this mistake meant the subsequent search was invalid.
An eight-justice majority said that the search was okay. The case turned on the word “reasonable.” The justices said that just because a police officer makes a “reasonable” mistake about the law, it does not mean that an otherwise legal search is invalid. The police officer’s mistake about the law must be objectively reasonable—that is, the type of mistake that would be made by a reasonably well-trained officer, not just any mistake made by any officer. Both the majority opinion and the concurrence stressed the belief that this ruling would not affect many situations, because in most cases the law is clear and well-known.
Justice Sotomayor dissented. She argued that this standard would be hard to apply to future cases—judges will be asked to determine whether an officer’s mistake about the law was objectively reasonable. Justice Sotomayor was worried about eroding peoples’ protections under the Fourth Amendment and giving police too much power.
(For those wondering about claims that “ignorance of the law is no excuse—except now, for the police”: see SCOTUSblog’s well-reasoned refute to this claim.)
Read more about the Heien decision at
