Race Ipsa (originally aired April 25, 2006)
Denny faces charges for shooting his therapist after being provoked. Alan and former Crane, Poole & Schmidt attorney Chelina Hall (now with the Legal Aid Society) defend a black man accused of resisting arrest after being stopped in a white neighborhood. Denise teaches Brad how to be a better kisser.
- Self-Defense. Denny thought that he was at risk of being shot when he shot his therapist and thus would ordinarily have a claim at self-defense. However, people generally cannot claim self-defense if they provoked the situation.
- Racial Profiling. The U.S. Department of Justice issued policies in 2003 that barred federal law enforcement officials from engaging in racial profiling; a fact sheet of these policies is on-line here. According to the fact sheet, while making routine law enforcement decisions such as traffic stops, federal law enforcement officers "may not use race or ethnicity to any degree, except that officers may rely on race and ethnicity if a specific suspect description exists. This prohibition applies even where the use of race or ethnicity might otherwise be lawful."
To help understand the problem of racial profiling better, many police agencies around the country are collecting racial and ethnic data for traffic stops. In Massachusetts, Northeastern University's Institute on Race and Justice examined state records and issued a report on May 4, 2004, finding some disparities in the citations given to black or Hispanic drivers compared to white drivers. The report is on-line here. Following the release of the report, 128 police agencies were required to collect more data as to traffic stops, though state officials said that such requirements were not a finding that the police agencies had engaged in improper profiling (October 2004 release on-line here).
Nationally, one effort to study the problem of racial profiling was the 1999 Police-Public Contact Survey conducted by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (on-line here). According to that study, blacks were overrepresented among those stopped, searched, and arrested, and Hispanics were overrepresented among those searched and arrested. Blacks represented 9.8 percent of licensed drivers, but represented 11.6 percent of those stopped at least once and 13.7 percent of those stopped more than once, 21.6 percent of those physically searched by police during a traffic stop, and 19.9 percent of those arrested. Hispanics represented 9.8 percent of licensed drivers and represented only 8.4 percent of those stopped, but represented 13.6 percent of those physically searched and 11.7 percent of those arrested.
However, the study warned that such data cannot be taken to prove or disprove the existence of racial profiling. "[T]he analysis cannot determine whether racial differences in the breaking of traffic laws rather than racial profiling is the reason for the higher rates at which black drivers were stopped by police," the report said at one point.
Legally, a police officer may not order a person to halt or remain in a particular place unless the officer has a reasonable, articulable suspicion to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. A traffic violation can serve as such sufficient grounds, even if police are using the traffic violation as a pretext to justify a stop (as the United States Supreme Court approved in its 1996 decision in Whren v United States). Once police stop someone, they can seize contraband that is in plain sight and can ask a motorist to allow them to search the car, a request to which many people surprisingly do consent.
The American Civil Liberties Union has reports on racial profiling on-line here and here.
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