Whitewashing the Fourth Amendment

• Author: Daniel S. Harawa
• Position: Associate Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis
• Pages: 923-982

ARTICLES

Whitewashing the Fourth Amendment

DANIEL S. HARAWA*

A conventional critical race critique of the Supreme Court and its

Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is that it erases race. Scholars argue

that by erasing race, the Court has crafted doctrine that is oblivious to

people of color’s lived experiences with policing in America.

This Article complicates this critique by asking whether it is solely the

Court that is doing the erasing. It explores how race was—or more accu-

rately, was not—litigated in seminal Fourth Amendment cases scholars

have targeted for attack: Florida v. Bostick, Illinois v. Wardlow, and

United States v. Drayton. As the Article shows, race was not raised, let

alone litigated, in these important Fourth Amendment cases, even though

the defendants in all three cases were Black.

This Article therefore rounds out the racial critiques of the Court and

its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Rather than solely blame the

Supreme Court, maybe we should hold attorneys partially responsible for

the erasure of race. Perhaps by not raising race, the profession has given

the Court license to ignore race in its Fourth Amendment case law.

This Article underscores the need to reevaluate how we as a profession

choose to address or ignore race. It proves that the profession more

broadly is complicit in the whitewashing of the Fourth Amendment. And

importantly, the insights of this Article extend beyond criminal law and

even beyond race. There is much work to be done to better understand

how lawyers contribute to marginalization under law.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 925

* Associate Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis. © 2023, Daniel S. Harawa. Many

thanks to Rachel Barkow, Jeannine Bell, Evan Bernick, Bennett Capers, Blanche Cook, Travis Crum,

Dan Epps, Trevor Gardner, Barry Friedman, Brandon Hasbrouck, Randy Hertz, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour,

Rene

´e Hutchins, John Inazu, Yuvraj Joshi, Peter Joy, Emma Kaufman, Andrea Katz, Pauline Kim, Bob

Kuehn, Katie Meyer, Martha Minow, Jamelia Morgan, Erin Murphy, Kerrel Murray, Kim Norwood,

Ngozi Okidegbe, Rafael Pardo, Daniel Richman, Maneka Sinha, Jonathan Smith, and Kate Weisburd for

reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this Article. Thanks also to participants in the Chicagoland

Junior Scholars Conference, Clinical Law Review Writers’ Workshop, and faculty workshops at

Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Maryland, and the University of Oklahoma.

Deepest gratitude to David DePriest, Faith Katz, Yaseen Morshed, and Malak Shahin for their research

assistance and inspiring conversations. Finally, I am grateful to The Georgetown Law Journal editors,

who worked hard to make this piece better. This publication was supported in part by a Washington

University in St. Louis Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity grant. Mistakes are my own.

923

I. WHO ERASES RACE? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 932

A. THE FREEDOM TO LEAVE AND FLORIDA V. BOSTICK .............. 935

1. The Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 935

2. The Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 935

3. The Racial Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 937

4. The Litigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 939

B. THE FREEDOM TO FLEE AND ILLINOIS V. WARDLOW .............. 941

1. The Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 941

2. The Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 942

3. The Racial Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 943

4. The Litigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 944

C. THE FREEDOM TO SAY NO AND UNITED STATES V. DRAYTON . . . . . . . . 947

1. The Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 947

2. The Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 948

3. The Racial Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 949

4. The Litigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 950

D. THE CHICKEN-AND-EGG PROBLEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 951

II. THE BENIGN NEGLECT OF RACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 956

A. LOOK WHO’S TALKING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 958

1. Supreme Court Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 958

2. Public Defender Offices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 962

B. LOOK WHO’S DECIDING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 966

1. Judges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 966

2. Law Clerks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 969

C. WHAT’S BEING TAUGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 970

III. THE NEED TO RECOGNIZE RACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 971

A. RACIALLY CONSCIOUS LAWYERING LEADING TO RACIALLY AWARE

JUDGING............................................... 972

924 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 111:923

B. RACIAL REALISM AND TRUTH-TELLING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 979

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 981

INTRODUCTION

The policing of Black people

1

is a frequent conversation topic both in and out-

side the ivory tower. It is easy to tick off the facts. Police stop Black drivers and

pedestrians at higher rates than non-Black drivers and pedestrians.

2

See Emma Pierson, Camelia Simoiu, Jan Overgoor, Sam Corbett-Davies, Daniel Jenson, Amy

Shoemaker, Vignesh Ramachandran, Phoebe Barghouty, Cheryl Phillips, Ravi Shroff & Sharad Goel, A

Large-Scale Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police Stops Across the United States, 4 NATURE HUM.

BEHAV. 736, 737 (2020) (collecting traffic stop data); Radley Balko, There’s Overwhelming Evidence

that the Criminal Justice System Is Racist. Here’s the Proof., WASH. POST (June 10, 2020), https://www.

washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/

(collecting studies about racial disparities in traffic stops and pedestrian stops).

After the

stop, police are more likely to search Black people than non-Black people.

3

Then,

police are more likely to arrest and jail Black people than non-Black people.

4

See ELIZABETH HINTON, LESHAE HENDERSON & CINDY REED, VERA INST. OF JUST., AN UNJUST

BURDEN: THE DISPARATE TREATMENT OF BLACK AMERICANS IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM 7 (May

2018), https://www.issuelab.org/resources/30758/30758.pdf [https://perma.cc/C4GC-JBBP].

Moreover, during these stops, officers are more likely to use force, including

deadly force, against Black people than non-Black people.

5

See, e.g., Lynne Peeples, Brutality and Racial Bias: What the Data Say, NATURE, July 2, 2020, at

22, 22; Susan Scutti, Police More Likely to Use Force on Blacks than Whites, Study Shows, CNN (July

12, 2016, 6:08 AM), https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/health/police-use-of-force-on-blacks/index.html

[https://perma.cc/34VN-CF8X].

None of this is new. America’s racialized policing problem is frighteningly famil-

iar. So familiar, that it may seem quaint to start a law review article with information

many people know. How to remedy racial disparities in policing, or whether they can

even be remediated, has been a focus of popular,

6

political,

7

See Nicholas Fandos, Democrats to Propose Broad Bill to Target Police Misconduct and Racial

Bias, N.Y. TIMES (June 23, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/politics/democrats-police-

misconduct-racial-bias.html.

and academic discourse.

8

1. I acknowledge at the outset that this Article is mostly framed in the Black–white binary. See, e.g.,

Devon W. Carbado & Cheryl I. Harris, Undocumented Criminal Procedure, 58 UCLA L. REV. 1543,

1547–48 (2011) (critiquing scholars for ignoring the racial dynamics of Fourth Amendment

jurisprudence and policing of Latinos). I do not mean to erase the experiences of other people of color

and other marginalized communities. Indeed, much more exploration needs to be done, and one article

could not begin to cover all the unique experiences of various people across the country when it comes

to interactions with police. However, given the disparate policing of Black people, the singular history

of policing Blackness, and that I am a Black man, this is where this Article devotes its attention. See

generally Angela J. Davis, Introduction to POLICING THE BLACK MAN: ARREST, PROSECUTION, AND

IMPRISONMENT, xi, xiv–xvii (Angela J. Davis ed., 2017) (explaining why the book focuses on Black

men). I hope this Article will inspire further explorations of the whitewashing of race beyond criminal

law and beyond the Black–white binary.

2.

3. See Pierson et al., supra note 2, at 738.

4.

5.

6. See Daniel S. Harawa, Lemonade: A Racial Justice Reframing of the Roberts Court’s Criminal

Jurisprudence, 110 CALIF. L. REV. 681, 694–95 (2022) (describing the widespread Black Lives Matter

protests rallying against police brutality).

7.

8. See, e.g., Amna A. Akbar, An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform, 108 CALIF. L. REV. 1781,

1788–90 (2020) (explaining that “[l]egal scholarship is undergoing a profound reckoning with the

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