ABSTRACT
In 1993, in Washington D.C., a team of vice officers violated regulations prohibiting unmarked police cars from enforcing traffic laws and stopped two young black men for remaining at a stop sign for a few seconds longer than usual. The defendants in Whren v. United States alleged that minority motorists across the nation were being targeted based on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) “drug courier profile.” They even cited the investigative news report of Sheriff Vogel’s men in their Supreme Court brief. Nonetheless, on the one hundredth anniversary of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court handed down a remarkably similar decision. Whereas the Plessy Court had declared there was no reason to assume segregation imposed a “badge of inferiority” while refusing to ask what other possible motivation the state legislature had had in demanding the separation of the races, the Whren Court declared that the Fourth Amendment “foreclose[s] any argument [regarding] the actual motivations of the individual officers involved.” Plessy and Whren both forbid the black litigants from asserting the white state actors were racially biased. Whren did note, in a single sentence, that such arguments are permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but the defendants were out of luck because their attorneys had pointed to the wrong Amendment. The importance of the pivotal Whren decision is best illustrated by a classic police training manual which instructs officers to use trivial traffic violations to stop motorists who look like potential drug couriers. Once the stop is made, sophisticated tools of psychological manipulation are explained which reliably entice drivers into waiving their constitutional rights and, “in a spirit of apparent cooperation,” agreeing to vehicle searches.
