A black man being wrongfully criminalized is not remarkable; it seems a daily occurrence in America. What is remarkable about this ruling is the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s explanation: that the police had no justifiable cause to stop Warren. Being a black man is, the court maintained, too vague a motive for arrest: “It was simply not possible for the police reasonably and rationally to target the defendant or any other black male wearing dark clothing as a suspect in the crime,” they said.
The court also noted that the police had no justifiable cause to arrest Warren for running away from them in the first place. In other words, it was within Warren’s legal rights to run from the police and, furthermore, the act of running away from the police does not imply guilt and is not grounds for arrest. The court cited precedent, including a 1996 ruling in which it determined, “Neither evasive behavior, proximity to a crime scene, nor matching a general description is alone sufficient to support… reasonable suspicion.”
Perhaps most remarkable of all, the court—quoting racial-profiling statistics—noted that black men were “disproportionately targeted” to the extent that flight from police should not necessarily be an admission of guilt. Rather, black men, who “in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO encounters,” the court declared, have “reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt.”
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