Stop and frisk: SC Supreme Court splits on racial lines in case about cops and race

The S.C. Supreme Court split on racial lines this week in a 3-2 decision involving whether Columbia area police violated an African American man’s constitutional protections against an unlawful search when they stopped and frisked him on a public street.

The man, Eric Spears, wound up getting 30 years in prison after being found guilty of having crack cocaine on him. Although the drug amount was relatively small — less than half an ounce — it was Spears’ third drug conviction and, under state law, Judge Robert Hood was required to give him 30 years.

In the Wednesday decision, the high court’s three white justices upheld the conviction. They said there were ample legal and evidence grounds to uphold the 2012 stop-and-frisk actions in broad daylight on a Columbia street by plainclothes law officers from a task force of DEA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Lexington and Richland sheriffs’ deputies.

Two white justices — John Few and Buck James — wrote that in a public encounter with law enforcement where there are no grounds for police to question a person, that person is free to decline to answer questions and has the right to walk away from police. Associate Justice Kaye Hearn agreed in a concurring opinion.

However, in this encounter with police, as Spears started to answer officers’ questions, he began patting his shirt, prompting one officer to repeatedly request Spears not to move his hands. After Spears refused, the officer told him he was going to frisk him to “be sure he didn’t have any weapons on him or anything that was going to hurt me,” the majority ruling said.

It was during that frisk that Agent Dennis Tracy found under Spears’ shirt a small ball of what turned out to be less than half an ounce of crack cocaine.

Because Spears did not at first refuse to answer questions and keep on walking, he had in effect given his consent to what happened next, the majority opinion said.

In their dissent, the court’s two African American justices — Chief Justice Don Beatty and acting Justice John Geathers — wrote that minority groups “are not always afforded the full protections of the Fourth Amendment.”

That amendment, part of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, prohibits unlawful searches and seizures and says that people have the right to be free of unreasonable intrusions. For a search to be legal, it must comply with several standards, including that it be done pursuant to a search warrant signed by a judge or, if lacking a judge, a probable cause - such as a fact-based suspicion that a person may have committed a crime.

Beatty, who wrote the dissent for himself and Geathers, said that African Americans “generally experience police misconduct and brutality at higher levels than other demographics” and fearing an adverse reaction from police, can react differently than other racial groups, who might feel more free to walk away from an encounter with police.

Spears and a woman companion, the dissenters wrote, had been followed by three law officers for 500 feet from a bus stop to “a more isolated area and quickened their pace to catch up to him.”

“In my view a reasonable person in this situation would not feel free to continue walking and disregard the agent’s request to talk,” Beatty wrote.

“This was not a situation in which the officers questioned passengers at random as they disembarked (from the bus) — Spears was singled out, followed and questioned,” Beatty wrote. “Therefore, under the totality of the circumstances, I do not believe a reasonable person in this situation would feel at liberty to terminate the encounter with law enforcement,” Beatty wrote.

The officers were at the Columbia bus stop because they had gotten a tip that two men were expected to bring a load of drugs to Columbia via one of the “Chinese bus lines,” a law enforcement term for interstate buses that leave from the Chinatown section of New York City.

“Because of the lack of security measures and required identification, these buses are frequently exploited by wanted criminals and people trafficking in narcotics and counterfeit merchandise,” the majority ruling said.

Buses from New York usually stop at various places in Columbia. Spears and his friend were not suspected of being drug mules from New York. The officers followed them because, unlike other passengers who disembarked in Columbia, they were not met by friends and relatives and they “appeared nervous” and kept looking at the officers, the majority ruling said.

Officers also believed that Spears and the woman, who had with them “four large bags (on a bus and were) coming out of a known source area for counterfeit goods,” might be carrying counterfeit goods, the opinion said.

In its ruling, the high court reversed a S.C. Court of Appeals ruling that found that the officers’ encounter with Spears’ violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

Geathers, who is a Court of Appeals judge, was on the case to replace Associate Justice John Kittredge, who did not sit on that case. Normally, the five-member Supreme Court has one African American justice — Chief Justice Beatty — and four white justices.

In a separate opinion, Justice Hearn wrote that she concurred with James and Few but was writing separately because she recognized that it is a valid issue whether Spears, as an African American male, “actually felt free to walk away from the encounter with law enforcement.”

That said, wrote Hearn, the issue was not raised in lower courts and thus cannot be properly and fully addressed by the Supreme Court.

“This important discussion originated from the bench (during oral arguments before the Supreme Court),” and so there is no fully developed lower court record for justices to consider the reasoning of the dissent, Hearn wrote.

Spears, now 50, has a projected release date of 2040, according to the S.C. Department of Corrections website.

This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 11:00 AM.