Deciding the Stop and Frisk Cases: A Look Inside the Supreme Court's Conference

St. John's Law Review Volume 72, Summer-Fall 1998, Numbers 3-4 Article 5 Deciding the Stop and Frisk Cases: A Look Inside the Supreme Court's Conference John Q. Barrett Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview Recommended Citation Barrett, John Q. (1998) "Deciding the Stop and Frisk Cases: A Look Inside the Supreme Court's Conference," St. John's Law Review: Vol. 72 : No. 3 , Article 5. Available at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview/vol72/iss3/5 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in St. John's Law Review by an authorized editor of St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . DECIDING THE STOP AND FRISK CASES: A LOOK INSIDE THE SUPREME COURT'S CONFERENCE JOHN Q. BARRETT* TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction ............................................................................ 751 II. The Supreme Court Setting for the Stop and Frisk Decisions ...................................................................................... A. The Justices of the 1967 Warren Court ........................... B. The Emergence of Stop and Frisk Constitutional Is- 755 755 "Assistant Professor, St. John's University School of Law. E-mail: . Many people helped me with this project. My initial, and extremely humble, thanks go to the Supreme Court Justices who preserved their personal and Court papers and decided to make them available to researchers. At some cost to both their personal privacy and the Court's institutional mystery, they recognized that history has a legitimate interest in all of the Court's work. They also have, in the process, chosen a path of perpetual public service, for the information in their papers and the public understanding it makes possible surely help to define, preserve and promote the constitutional place, future and independence of the Court itself. At a more practical level, my deep thanks also go to the excellent librarians and other skilled personnel, especially Akiba Covitz, Jeff Flannery, and Nancy Lyon, who helped my work in the great libraries at Princeton, Yale, and the unparalleled Library of Congress. They repeatedly helped me identify relevant material in their libraries' collections and obtain necessary permissions to conduct research there. They also sent me additional documents as they came to light, and they even helped decipher some of the Justices' most difficult handwriting. I am also very grateful to the executors who gave me permission to use, and in some instances to quote from and describe, Justice Black's, Justice Brennan's, Justice Douglas's, Justice Fortas's, and the American Civil Liberties Union's papers. I also thank Tyrone Brown, Louis Cohen, Joshua Dressler, Earl Dudley, Raymond Fisher, Jerry Goldman, Laura Kalman, Yale Kamisar, Bill Reppy, David Rosenbloom, Kim Seneker, George Thomas, Stephen Wainwright, Stephen Wermiel, and Tinsley Yarbrough, who generously provided encouragement, good research guidance, important documents and/or helpful recollections; Charles Bobis, Tanya Hern~ndez, Paul Kirgis, Michael Simons, Susan Stabile, and Brian Tamanaha, who provided very helpful comments on drafts of this article; and Robert T. Langdon (SJU Law '00), Lara C. Moynihan (SJU Law '98), and Anne Marie Troiano (SJU Law '99), who were excellent research assistants on this project. ST. JOHN'S LAW REVIEW [72:749 758 su es ................................................................................... 761 C. The Court Takes the Cases .............................................. 1. Wainwright v. New Orleans ........................................ 761 763 2. Sibron v. N ew York ...................................................... 3. Peters v. N ew York ....................................................... 765 4. Terry v. Ohio ................................................................ 767 III. Initial Approaches to the Stop and Frisk Cases ................. 769 A. The Justices' Pre-Argument Consideration of the C ases ................................................................................. 769 B. The Wainwright Conference and Early Draft Opinions. 772 C. The Court's December 1967 Conference .......................... 778 1. Wainwright ................................................................. 780 2. S ibron.......................................................................... 781 3. Peters ........................................................................... 783 4. Terry ............................................................................ 784 D. Observations on the Justices' Conference Discussions... 790 IV. Efforts to Decide the Cases Within the "Probable Cause" Fram ew ork .................................................................................. 793 A. Chief Justice Warren's Initial Proposed Opinions for the C ourt .......................................................................... 793 1. The Drafting Process .................................................. 793 2. The First Circulation of Terry .................................... 796 3. The First Circulation of Sibron and Peters................ 798 4. Private Reactions of Justices Black and Fortas ........ 800 B. Justice Black Writes Separately ...................................... 803 C. Chief Justice Warren Recirculates .................................. 806 D. Justice White's Broad View of the Stop .......................... 807 E. Justice Douglas Describes the Probable Cause for the Terry Stops and Frisks ..................................................... 809 F. Justice Harlan Endorses Stops, Including SelfProtective Frisks, Based on "Reasonable Suspicion"....... 810 G. A Warren Chambers Assessment of the Justices' Responses ......................................................................... 816 V. The Shift to "Reasonableness".............................................. 821 A. Justice Brennan's Contribution Behind the Scenes ........ 821 B. Chief Justice Warren Recirculates Again ....................... 827 VI. Final Positions Take Shape and the Court Decides ........... 830 A. Justice Douglas's Terry Dissent and His Sibron and Peters Concurring Opinions .............................................. 830 B. Justice Harlan's Concurring Opinions ............................ 832 C. The Court's Stop and Frisk Decisions ............................. 835 1998] DECIDINGTHE STOP AND FRISK CASES D. Dismissing Wainwright ................................................... 835 VII. Conclusion: Our Understanding of the Justices' Work, the Stop and Frisk Decisions and the Court's Process of D eciding ............................................................................. 838 [Tihe compromise the Court may make in this area is going to last longer than a lifetime. -Assistant District Attor (...truncated)