The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a case that could have settled whether police officers must apply different legal standards to suspects based on their race, and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas made clear they believe the court got it wrong.
The case, U.S. v. Donte J. Carter, grew out of a street encounter in which officers recovered a stolen.40-caliber pistol from a man who had lied about being armed. A lower court threw out Carter's convictions by injecting race into the Fourth Amendment's "reasonable person" test. Alito, writing for himself and Thomas, called the ruling dangerous, and warned it would force officers to sort people by skin color before deciding how to do their jobs.
The rest of the court let the lower ruling stand without comment.
The facts of the underlying encounter are not complicated. Officers approached Donte J. Carter and asked whether he was carrying a weapon. Carter said no. When police asked him to pull up his pants, they noticed an L-shaped bulge. That bulge turned out to be a.40-caliber pistol, one that had been stolen from an FBI agent's vehicle.
Carter was charged with firearm and theft offenses. He was convicted.
Then the D.C. Court of Appeals stepped in and vacated those convictions. The appeals court held that the police encounter effectively became a seizure before officers had established reasonable suspicion. So far, a conventional Fourth Amendment dispute. But the D.C. court went further, much further.
It ruled that Carter's race was relevant to whether a reasonable person in his position would have felt free to walk away from the encounter. The court stated that "black Americans like [Carter] are 'especially distrustful of law enforcement'" and are "'less likely' than other people 'to terminate a police encounter' due to skepticism that any attempt to exercise their constitutional rights will be respected."
In other words, the court held that because Carter is Black, a different legal standard applies to whether he was effectively detained.
Alito did not mince words. His dissent framed the D.C. ruling as a direct collision with the Supreme Court's own precedents on race-neutral government action. He cited Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Louisiana v. Callais, and Shaw v. Reno, cases spanning affirmative action and redistricting, to argue that the Constitution forbids the government from treating individuals differently based on group racial characteristics.
"It is dangerous to allow an individual to be treated differently based on statistics, studies, or expert testimony that purports to show that members of the racial or ethnic group to which he belongs are more likely to act in a certain way than are members of other groups."
That line carries weight well beyond this single case. Alito was pointing at a principle: once courts begin sorting legal outcomes by racial group membership, there is no clean stopping point.
He pressed the practical consequences with a question the D.C. court never answered. As Alito put it:
"Under the test, officers will need to quickly assess a person's race, and if officers and courts must craft special rules for black persons, what about dark-skinned Latinos, other Latinos, and members of other minority groups?"
That is not a hypothetical. It is a description of what the D.C. standard actually requires on the street, in real time, from officers making split-second decisions. The sharp tone of the dissent reflected a frustration that the full court declined to address it.
The United States government, as a party in the case, had already flagged the problem before the D.C. Court of Appeals. Federal prosecutors argued the ruling forced police officers to assume that all Black people share the same attitudes toward law enforcement, that every Black person would feel unable to walk away from a police encounter in the same way.
Alito echoed that concern, invoking the court's own language from Shaw v. Reno:
"And we have rejected the proposition that the Constitution permits an individual to be treated differently based on a 'perception that members of the same racial group, regardless of their age, education, economic status, or the community in which they live, think alike.'"
The irony is hard to miss. A legal doctrine designed to protect racial minorities ends up reducing them to a monolithic group defined by a single assumed mindset. The D.C. court's reasoning treats every Black American as interchangeable, same distrust, same reluctance, same reaction to police, regardless of individual circumstance.
Alito noted as much, adding a warning that cuts both directions. The race-conscious standard helped Carter in this case by getting his convictions thrown out. But the same logic could just as easily work against a minority defendant in a future case.
"Here, the special treatment helped the individual; in other situations it will not."
That is the trap. Once race becomes a formal variable in Fourth Amendment analysis, it does not only flow one way. Courts and officers would be required to weigh racial identity in every encounter, sometimes to a suspect's benefit, sometimes not.
Only Alito and Thomas voted to take the case. The remaining justices offered no written explanation for declining certiorari. That silence leaves the D.C. Court of Appeals ruling intact and its race-conscious reasonable-person standard in place, at least within its jurisdiction.
The decision not to hear the case does not set binding precedent nationwide. But it does leave a live legal framework that other courts could adopt or cite. And it leaves law enforcement officers in the D.C. jurisdiction operating under a standard that, by Alito's account, requires them to classify suspects by race before determining whether a Fourth Amendment seizure occurred.
Clarence Thomas has previously expressed deep frustration with the court's refusal to address cases he considers constitutionally urgent. His decision to join Alito's dissent here signals he views the race-based reasonable-person standard as exactly that kind of problem, one the court cannot afford to leave unresolved.
The broader pattern is worth noting. The current court has shown willingness to revisit race-conscious government action in other contexts. Students for Fair Admissions struck down race-based college admissions. Louisiana v. Callais addressed racial considerations in redistricting. Yet when the same principle arose in the context of criminal law and policing, the court walked away.
For officers working the streets, the practical effect of the D.C. standard is straightforward and troubling. Before determining whether a person has been "seized" under the Fourth Amendment, an officer would need to assess the person's race, then apply a different legal threshold based on that assessment.
Alito's question, what about dark-skinned Latinos, other Latinos, members of other minority groups, is not rhetorical posturing. It describes the logical next step. If Black Americans receive a distinct reasonable-person standard, on what basis would courts deny the same treatment to other groups that report distrust of police? The standard, once race-conscious, demands an ever-expanding taxonomy of racial categories, each with its own legal threshold.
Meanwhile, Donte J. Carter, a man who lied to officers about carrying a weapon, a man found in possession of a stolen FBI firearm, walks free. His convictions for the gun charge and the theft charge were vacated. The D.C. Court of Appeals did not dispute the facts of the encounter. It simply held that because of Carter's race, the encounter became an unlawful seizure sooner than it otherwise would have.
Internal divisions on the Supreme Court have become a recurring feature of this era. Justices write separately, dissent sharply, and signal disagreements that the majority prefers to leave unaddressed. But not every disagreement carries the same stakes. This one involves the foundational question of whether the Constitution permits, or requires, the government to treat people differently based on their race during routine law enforcement encounters.
Alito framed the answer clearly. The Constitution, he wrote, "is color-blind." It "'almost never' allows government actors to treat persons differently based on their race."
The D.C. Court of Appeals disagreed. The Supreme Court, by a margin of seven to two, chose not to weigh in.
Chief Justice Roberts has insisted the court is not a political body. Perhaps not. But when seven justices decline to address a lower court ruling that sorts Americans by race for purposes of criminal law, the distinction between political and principled starts to blur.
A man lied about a gun, carried a stolen FBI weapon, and had his convictions erased, because a court decided his race changed the rules. If that does not merit the Supreme Court's attention, it is fair to ask what would.
