With respect to the ruling in Terry v. Ohio, police officers are authorized to conduct “a brief investigatory stop of an individual when there is reasonable and articulable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot.” A justifiable reasonable suspicion should take into consideration the complete scene and circumstances, just like it was ruled in United States v. Cortez in 1981. The Court held that the totality of the circumstances should be taken into consideration before conducting an investigatory stop. In this case, unprovoked flight in a high crime area is not sufficient to justify a Terry stop. There are no independently suspicious circumstances to justify the investigatory stop of the defendant, thus making the stop and the protective search a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Officer White’s description of the area as “one of high…show more content… At best, a justifiable reasonable suspicion would have only been used for a stop and frisk. The police had no evidence or probable cause to claim an unlawful use of a weapon by Mr. Henderson. This is clearly a violation of the Fourth Amendment because the Constitution protects people from unreasonable seizures and searches unless based on probable cause. In addition, according to the Illinois Criminal Code (725 ILCS 5/108-1.01), when an officer “has stopped a person for temporary questioning and reasonably suspects that he or another is in danger of attack, he may search the person for weapons.” Even if the officers were able to justify a reasonable suspicion, they were not in danger of attack so they had no right to search the men for weapons. Overall, they would have only been able to conduct a protective search if they had a reason to stop Mr. Henderson and his companion in first place, but not even this investigatory stop had a reasonable basis to have been carried
