No Suspicion When African American Man Tries to Avoid Police Encounter, Mass SCJ Rules

On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued a unanimous ruling granting a motion to suppress and throwing out the conviction of Jimmy Warren, an African-American male.  According to the court, the underlying investigatory stop was not based on reasonable suspicion.  

The court’s ruling reviews the facts of the investigatory stop in painstaking detail, showing that the police in question quickly jumped to assumptions about the likely criminal activity of the accused.  But the opinion also rests in part on the unremarkable conclusion that there is nothing unusual or suspicious about a black man running the other way when the police attempt to initiate a consensual field investigation.   The court cites a recent Boston police department study showing that black men are targeted for a disproportionate number of stop and frisks, with many having repeated encounters with the police despite no evidence of criminal activity.  No wonder, the court concluded, black men would try to avoid such engagement by simply getting away from the police.  And when police are initiating a field investigation, there is nothing illegal about simply avoiding their inquiries.  

That the SJC’s opinion rests on common sense and an appreciation of the experiences of black men in Boston surely is due in significant part to Justice Geraldine Hines, who joined the court in 2014 and wrote the SJC’s opinion in Commonwealth v. Jimmy Warren.  A career civil rights advocate working on human rights in the US and abroad before she took the bench, Justice Hines is the first African American woman to serve on the Massachusetts high court.  The decision in the Warren case was unanimous, but there is no mistaking contributions that Justice Hines’ experience and perspective made to the decision.