Stories of Fourth Amendment Disrespect: from Elian to the Internment
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Fordham Law Review Volume 70 Issue 6 Article 18 2002 Stories of Fourth Amendment Disrespect: From Elian to the Internment Andrew E. Taslitz Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Andrew E. Taslitz, Stories of Fourth Amendment Disrespect: From Elian to the Internment, 70 Fordham L. Rev. 2257 (2002). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol70/iss6/18 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Stories of Fourth Amendment Disrespect: From Elian to the Internment Cover Page Footnote Visiting Professor, Duke University Law School, 2000-01; Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law; J.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Law, 1981, former Assistant District Attorney, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I thank my wife, Patricia V. Sun, Esq., Professors Robert Mosteller, Sara Sun-Beale, Girardeau Spann, joseph Kennedy, Eric Muller, Ronald Wright, and many other members of the Triangle Criminal Law Working Group, for their comments on early drafts of this Article. I also thank my research assistants, Nicole Crawford, Eli Mazur, and Amy Pope, and my secretary, Ann McCloskey. Appreciation also goes to the Howard University School of Law for funding this project, and to the Duke University Law School for helping me see this effort through to its completion. This article is available in Fordham Law Review: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol70/iss6/18 ARTICLES STORIES OF FOURTH AMENDMENT DISRESPECT: FROM ELIAN TO THE INTERNMENT Andrew E. Taslitz* I. RESPECT: THE MISSING PIECE OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT PUZZLE A. BroaderFourth Amendment Lessons to Be Learned from the Racial Profiling Controversy In early April 2001, an unarmed black teenager, Timothy Thomas, was shot to death by Cincinnati police officers.1 The officers were pursuing Thomas on outstanding arrest warrants for two alleged misdemeanors and numerous traffic offenses.2 The shooting sparked protests in Cincinnati's African-American community, as protesters alleged that the officers used excessive force because of Thomas's race Thomas was the fourth black male killed by the Cincinnati police since 1995, the police having killed not one white suspect during that time.4 Feelings ran so high that the protests turned violent, with newspapers describing the reaction as a riot.5 * Visiting Professor, Duke University Law School, 2000-01; Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law; J.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Law, 1981, former Assistant District Attorney, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I thank my wife, Patricia V. Sun, Esq., Professors Robert Mosteller, Sara Sun-Beale, Girardeau Spann, Joseph Kennedy, Eric Muller, Ronald Wright, and many other members of the Triangle Criminal Law Working Group, for their comments on early drafts of this Article. I also thank my research assistants, Nicole Crawford, Eli Mazur, and Amy Pope, and my secretary, Ann McCloskey. Appreciation also goes to the Howard University School of Law for funding this project, and to the Duke University Law School for helping me see this effort through to its completion. 1. Amy DePaul & Peter Slevin, Cincinnati Officials Impose Curfew; Mayor Acknowledges Race Woes as City Acts to Quell Violence, Wash. Post, Apr. 13,2001, at Al. 2- See id. 3. See Francis X. Clines, In Aftershock of Unrest, CincinnatiSeeks Answers, N.Y. Times, Apr. 23, 2001, at All [hereinafter Clines, Aftershock of Unrest] (suggesting protests partly sparked by concerns that the Thomas shooting was the latest in a long line of excessive force cases). 4. See Cincinnati Calm After 2 Days of Violence"Riots Had Followed Shooting by 2257 2258 FORDHAM LAW REVIEW [Vol. 70 But, the protests and resulting violence were about far more than the excessive use of force. Protesters were also angered at, in their view, years of degrading racial profiling by the local police.6 A teenager interviewed by the Washington Post seemed to capture the sense of the community: "The riots are not just a reaction to the killing of an African American male, but to the injustice to our people for so long," said Christopher Johnson, 16, as he stood on the church steps. "Just walking down the street I get asked [by police], 'What are you doing?' I pay 7taxes like they do. I should be able to walk down a public street.", Indeed, shortly before the Thomas shooting, the Cincinnati Black United Front and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed a lawsuit accusing the city's police force of a thirty-year pattern of racial profiling, including unduly frequent traffic and jaywalking stops, often involving unnecessary humiliation and use of force.8 Cincinnati was, of course, an infamous site of riots breaking out in the violent summer of 1968, after African-Americans charged that they were harassed by local police abusing their discretion under loitering laws.9 That allegation was supported the next year by the Kerner Commission's Report examining the causes of those riots and of similar violence in seven other cities." The recent ACLU suit essentially alleges that little has changed since 1968.11 The Cincinnati protests were a particularly dramatic reaction to the perception that the police were engaging in racial profiling. But nationwide concerns about racial profiling have been in national headlines for the past several years.1 2 Extreme incidents ending in Police, N.Y. Times, Apr. 12,2001, at Al [hereinafter CincinnatiCalm]. 5. See id. 6. See Clines, Aftershock of Unrest, supra note 3; Cincinnati Calm, supra note 4; DePaul & Slevin, supra note 1. 7. DePaul & Slevin, supra note 1. 8. See id.; see also Clines, Aftershock of Unrest, supra note 3; Cincinnati Calm, supra note 4. 9. See DePaul & Slevin, supra note 1; see generally Andrew E. Taslitz, Mob Violence and Vigilantism, in The Oxford Companion to American Law (Kermit L. Hall et al. eds., 2002) [hereinafter Taslitz, Mob Violence and Vigilantism] (discussing social forces causing the 1968 urban race riots in Cincinnati and other major cities). 10. See DePaul & Slevin, supra note 1; see also Taslitz, Mob Violence and Vigilantism, supra note 9. 11. See DePaul & Slevin, supra note 1 ("We have not a few isolated incidents .... We have a pattern perceived by the Kerner Commission in 1968 and perceived continuously to this day. It's difficult for the city to credibly deny that this problem exists." (quoting Raymond Vasvari, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio)). 12. See, e.g., David A. Harris, The Stories, the Statistics, and the Law: Why "Driving While Black" Matters, 84 Minn. L. Rev. 265, 265-75 nn. 1-56 (1999) [hereinafter Harris, Statistics] (collecting selected interviews and news stories on racial profiling); Jeffrey Goldberg, The Color of Suspicion, N.Y. Times, June 20, 1999, § 6 2002] STORIES OF FOURTH AMENDMENT DISRESPECT 2259 shooting deaths like Thomas's have drawn particular attention, 3 as have particularly invasive searches like that of Patricia Appleton, a black woman travel agent returning from Jamaica via Chicago's O'Hare Airport. 4 The American Bar Association's Journal described the February 1997 search by United States Customs officials: [T]hey directed her to a small room, barely the size of a jail cell, where Appleton assumed that she would be patted down. After about 20 minutes, two female customs inspectors entered. "They told me they were going to strip-search me," Appleton recalls. "They didn't give me a reason." The next thing Appleton knew, she was naked and spread-eagled against the wall. The inspector told her to back up two steps, bend over and grab her ankles. "I think I see something," she remembers one inspector saying. "They made me bend over farther. By then, I'm hysterical and crying. I said, 'I can't do this anymore."' Finally, they let her go. They eventually told her they suspected she'd swallowed drugs. Appleton says only one other event in her life approached the humiliation and vulnerability she felt at O'Hare: "I had been brutally raped when I was 15, and this was close to it.""5 Any strip search is, of course, extremely emotionally disturbing, but this search was made worse by Appleton's belief that her race prompted the Customs Service's extreme action." Indeed, in August of that same year, she was strip-searched at O'Hare again. She ultimately joined eighty-four other African-American women in a lawsuit against the Customs Service, alleging that the women were strip-searched because they were black. 7 What is especially interesting about extreme cases like Thomas's killing and Appleton's strip search, however, is that far more mundane cases of alleged racial profiling-such as brief investigative (Magazine), at 51 (providing a lengthy expose about racial profiling and officers' views on the subject); accord Katheryn K. Russell, The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions 33-46 (1998) (summarizing empirical, historical, and anecdotal data on racial profiling). 13. See Jill Nelson, Police Brutality: An Anthology 9-11 (Jill Nelson ed., 2000) (portraying the police shooting and killing of twenty-two year-old Guinea immigrant, Amadou Diallo, as the quintessential modem example of race-based police decisionmaking). 14. See John Gibeaut, Marked for Humiliation, 85 A.B.A. J., Feb. 1999, at 46. 15. Id 16. See id 17. See id. In apparent reaction to these sorts of lawsuits and to critical media coverage, the Customs Service seems to have significantly reduced racial profiling by its inspectors.