§ 17.01 Terry v. Ohio: An Overview to a Landmark Case

• Jurisdiction: North Carolina

§ 17.01 Terry v. Ohio: An Overview to a Landmark Case¹

The Fourth Amendment was once considered a monolith.² "Probable cause" had a single meaning, and "searches" and "seizures" were all-or-nothing concepts. The monolith was cracked by the Supreme Court in Camara v. Municipal Court.³ In Camara, the justices recognized a different form of "probable cause,"⁴ applicable in so-called administrative-search cases,⁵ that does not require individualized suspicion of criminal wrongdoing and that is based on the general Fourth Amendment standard of "reasonableness." To determine "reasonableness," the Camara Court invoked a balancing test, in which the individual's and society's interests in the given type of administrative search were weighed against each other.

If Camara cracked the Fourth Amendment monolith, Terry v. Ohio⁶ broke it entirely. Although the issue in Terry was described by the Court as "quite narrow" — "whether it is always unreasonable for a policeman to seize a person and subject him to a limited search for weapons unless there is probable cause to arrest" — the significance of the case to Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is, quite simply, monumental. In terms of the daily activities of the police, as well as the experiences of persons "on the street," there is probably no Supreme Court Fourth Amendment case of greater practical impact.

The significance of Terry will be seen in this chapter, but a brief overview is appropriate. First, Terry transported Camara's "reasonableness" balancing test from the realm of administrative searches to traditional criminal investigations, and used it to determine the reasonableness of certain warrantless searches and seizures, rather than merely to define "probable cause." The result has been a significant diminution in the role of the Warrant Clause in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. That is, Terry provided the impetus, as well as the framework, for a move by the Supreme Court away from the proposition that "warrantless searches are per se unreasonable," to the competing view that the appropriate test of police conduct "is not whether it is reasonable to procure a search warrant, but whether the search was reasonable."⁷Warrantless police conduct became much easier to justify after Terry.

Second, Terry recognized that searches and seizures can vary in their intrusiveness. The Court no longer treats all searches and all seizures alike. As a result of this case, many police-citizen on-the-street encounters that do not involve arrests or full-blown searches come within the scope of...