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Article: "Could" this be the end of Fourth Amendment protections for motorists?(Supreme Court Review)
- Article from:
- Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
- Article date:
- March 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Northwestern University, School of Law. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Whren v. United States, 116 S. Ct. 1769 (1996)
I. INTRODUCTION
In Whren v. United States,(1) the Supreme Court established a bright-line rule that a police officer's traffic stop is justified by probable cause to believe that a traffic violation has occurred.(2) The Court declined to adopt a standard that would take police officers' subjective motivations into account, asserting that "[s]ubjective intentions play no role in ordinary, probable-cause Fourth Amendment analysis."(3) Thus, the Court, with its decision, legitimated a purely objective "could" test, which simply asks whether a police officer "could have" stopped a vehicle for a traffic ...