Terry V. Ohio - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

Chief Justice Warren's opinion for the Court began by reciting first principles. The Fourth Amendment protects "people, not places", against "unreasonable searches and seizures". The question the Court confronted was whether "in all the circumstances of this on-the-street encounter", Terry's reasonable expectation of privacy had been impermissibly invaded.

The procedure called "stop and frisk" was controversial. Police argue that they require a certain flexibility in dealing with quickly evolving and potentially dangerous situations that arise during routine patrol of the streets. On the other hand, those suspicious of giving the police broad investigatory power contended that the police should not be able to assert their authority over citizens without some specific justification upon intrusion into protected personal security, coupled with judicial oversight to ensure that the police do not routinely abuse their authority. For the Court, however, the question was not the propriety of the police actions in the abstract but the admissibility of the evidence obtained through that police action. "In our system evidentiary rulings provide the context in which the judicial process of inclusion and exclusion approves some conduct as comporting with constitutional guarantees and disapproves other actions by state agents." For this purpose the exclusionary rule of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), had evolved and been applied against both state and federal agents.

Thus the question was not whether the stop-and-frisk procedure was proper by itself, but whether the exclusionary rule was an appropriate deterrent of police misconduct during such encounters.

In view of these concerns, the Court next asked 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 for an arrest."