Crim Pro Florida v. Royer Notes PDF

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Florida v. Royer...

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Criminal Procedure Fall 2020

Florida v. Royer (pg. 276 in Dressler) o In this case, Royer, about to embark on an airplane, fit a drug-courier profile in that he: (1) Was traveling from a major drug source city; (2) Paid for his ticket in cash with a large number of small bills; (3) Traveled under an assumed name; and (4) Appeared to be nervous. o The court stated that when the police learned that R was traveling under an assumed name, this fact, and the facts already known to the officers, justified a temporary detention.

United States v. Sokolow (pg. 277 in Dressler) o In this case, the conduct of S, a passenger disembarking from an airplane, fit a drug-courier profile in that: (1) He paid for airplane tickets totaling $2,100 with a roll of $20 bills; (2) He traveled under a name different from that listen on his telephone number; (3) His original destination was Miami, a major drug source city; (4) He stayed in the city, in July, for only two days, although his round-trip flight from Hawaii lasted 20 hours; (5) He appeared nervous; and (6) He did not check any of his luggage.

o The court concluded that each of these factors was “quite consistent with innocent travel.” On the other hand, it founds factors (1) and (4) out of the ordinary; and it thought that the existence of factor (2) gave the police reasonable grounds for believing that S was traveling under an alias. Taken together, these three factors amounted to reasonable suspicion of drug trafficking. o Most drug-courier profile cases at the lower court level tend to be evaluated “in a common-sense fashion,” based on the particular factors present in the case, “without accepting the profile itself as establishing that certain combinations of factors are inevitably sufficient to support a Terry stop. Indeed, in the absence of statistical evidence presented to the trial court demonstrating the existence of a reasonable correlation between a profile and drug activity, courts have no logical basis for considering the drugcourier profile, as such. As always, each case should be decided on its own merits. ***One additional and serious concern with drug-courier (or, today, terrorism) profiles, if accepted uncritically, is that they can serve as subterfuge for racial profiling, particularly if the profile includes a racial or ethnic factor, and the other factors are largely correlated with, rather than independent of, the racial or ethnic factor....