Overview
- In District of Columbia v. R.W., the Court issued an unsigned summary reversal Monday, voting 7–2 to uphold a D.C. police stop.
- The per curiam opinion faulted the D.C. Court of Appeals for not weighing the totality of the circumstances, a standard that lets officers add up small clues to find reasonable suspicion.
- The case stems from a 2 a.m. 2023 dispatch where two people ran from a parked car and the remaining driver began backing out with a door still open before an officer ordered him to show his hands.
- Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a solo dissent calling the intervention an improper fix to a factbound ruling, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted she would have denied review.
- The lineup, with Justice Elena Kagan in the majority, underscores a broader fight over fast, unsigned rulings on the Court’s order list and how much deference to give lower courts in Fourth Amendment cases.