The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge that two justices say forces police to use different rules for people based on race, and the dissent from Justices Alito and Thomas makes a pointed argument about equal treatment under the Constitution. Their objections focus on how a D.C. appeals court treated a Black defendant’s interaction with officers and whether that treatment turns race into a quick judgment for law enforcement. This piece walks through the core facts, the legal disagreement, and why the dissenters warn of a slippery slope when race becomes a factor in assessing police encounters.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas filed a dissent from the Court’s decision not to take the case, warning against what they see as racialized policing rules. “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,” Alito wrote on behalf of himself and Thomas. “Here, the special treatment helped the individual; in other situations it will not.”
The dispute centers on U.S. v. Donte J. Carter, a case where officers seized a man and later found a .40-caliber pistol in his pants, a weapon the government says was stolen from an FBI vehicle. The D.C. Court of Appeals concluded the initial stop lacked reasonable suspicion and therefore vacated Carter’s firearm and theft convictions because the encounter was effectively a seizure. That legal finding turned a routine street interaction into a constitutional problem for the prosecution.
The appeals court explained its decision by pointing to how some communities view police, suggesting that “black Americans like [Carter] are ‘especially distrustful of law enforcement’” and therefore “‘less likely’ than other people ‘to terminate a police encounter’ due to skepticism that any attempt to exercise their constitutional rights will be respected.” That reasoning, in the D.C. court’s view, made race relevant to whether a reasonable person in Carter’s position would have felt free to end the encounter.
Alito and Thomas warned that accepting that logic forces officers to consider race on the spot and treat people differently as a legal matter. “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?” Alito continued. “We have said that our ’Constitution is color-blind’.’ It ‘almost never’ allows government actors to treat persons differently based on their race.”
The dissent anchors its critique in precedent, pointing to decisions like Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Louisiana v. Callais, and Shaw v. Reno to show the Court has repeatedly resisted race-based government action. Those cases establish limits on treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, and the dissenters argue the D.C. ruling conflicts with that line of authority. The concern is practical as well as doctrinal: once courts allow race to explain behavior, they invite more race-based legal rules.
Alito drove the point home by recalling the Court’s broader rejection of group-based assumptions, noting that “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,'” Alito wrote, citing Shaw v. Reno. That language is blunt: the Constitution, the dissent insists, forbids stereotyping by public actors even if those stereotypes are presented as social science or expert testimony.
On the case facts, Carter initially lied when officers asked whether he was carrying a weapon, answering in the negative. Officers then asked him to pull his pants up and noticed an L-shaped bulge later identified as the .40-caliber pistol at issue. The gun’s alleged theft from a federal agent’s vehicle added weight to the prosecution’s case but did not alter the dissent’s focus on whether the stop itself complied with Fourth Amendment standards.
