BY Herschel Smith
10 years, 3 months ago
Arizona Daily Sun:
Police cannot frisk someone they stop and question absent some “reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot,” the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
In their unanimous decision affirming the right to carry a gun without interference, the justices rejected arguments by prosecutors that a simple belief someone is armed and dangerous is enough to justify a frisk, even without any evidence of criminal activity. They said the U.S. Constitution dictates otherwise.
“The Fourth Amendment protects the right of people to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures,” wrote Justice Rebecca Berch.
“When officers consensually engage citizens on the street without having any evidence of wrongdoing, the mere presence of a weapon does not afford officers constitutional permission to search weapons-carrying individuals,” she said. “To conclude otherwise would potentially subject countless law-abiding persons solely for exercising their right to carry a firearm.”
Berch said police still can ask people if they are carrying a weapon. And they remain free to ask that person to hand it over while they are talking.
But she also said those individuals remain free to walk away.
Good for them. There is no prima facie reason that police should be any more concerned about their own safety than ordinary citizens should be about theirs, and no one has given the right to citizens to demand that police give up their weapons during conversations (although something like that would have saved many lives).
It also doesn’t surprise me one bit that the police and state argued otherwise. I would expect them to. To someone who knows more about the law than I do, please weigh in if you can explain this to me. But it seems that we’ve covered this ground before, and to at least some extent this (warrantless searches) is a recapitulation of things decided in Arizona versus Gant.
