The Supreme Court just refused to clean up a lower-court mess that could change how police do their jobs on the street.
On June 22, 2026, the justices declined to take up United States v. Carter. That left a D.C. Court of Appeals ruling in place.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented from that denial. Justice Clarence Thomas joined him.
Their warning was blunt. The lower court’s approach risks pushing officers into a different set of rules depending on the race of the person in front of them.
SCOTUS RULING
The Supreme Court left undisturbed a lower-court ruling that allows judges to consider race-specific lived experiences when deciding whether a reasonable Black person would feel free to leave a police encounter.
Justice Alito and Justice Thomas dissented. pic.twitter.com/z9A1OIUJkV
— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) June 22, 2026
Here is what happened on the ground. Officers in Washington, D.C. heard gunshots and approached a group of people nearby.
An officer spotted a bulge near Donte Carter’s waistband.
Police recovered a stolen gun.
That should be a clean case. Gunshots, a suspicious bulge, a stolen firearm.
Instead, the D.C. Court of Appeals vacated Carter’s convictions. The court decided he had been seized before officers had reasonable suspicion to justify it.
To get there, the lower court folded race and distrust of police into the analysis of whether a reasonable person would have felt free to walk away.
The Cornell Law School text of the order lays out the posture clearly. This was No. 25-885, decided June 22, 2026, and the petition for review was denied.
The same text summarizes why Alito thought the case was worth taking. Officers were responding after gunshots, encountered a group nearby, saw facts they believed pointed to a firearm, and recovered a stolen gun.
Alito’s dissent argued that the D.C. court treated race and distrust of police as part of the reasonable-person test itself. That takes a core Fourth Amendment question and pushes it toward separate standards for separate races.
The dissent also warned that officers on the street need administrable rules. A standard that changes with race and assumed social experience makes the next emergency stop harder to judge in real time.
The official Supreme Court order list confirms the procedural posture. Certiorari was denied; the full Court did not issue a merits ruling.
Readers should keep that line clear. The high court did not bless the D.C. reasoning, rewrite the Fourth Amendment, or issue a full opinion on the merits.
The denial still leaves the lower-court decision in place for the parties and allows that reasoning to sit there unless another case reaches the justices. Alito and Thomas used the denial to warn that the issue is too important to ignore.
The order-list format is the point. A short denial can still leave real-world confusion for officers, prosecutors, defendants, and lower courts trying to apply the Fourth Amendment tomorrow morning.
Fox News reported the move the same day and summarized the Alito and Thomas dissent.
The report highlighted the practical danger for officers: a street encounter can become a race-based guessing game during a moment when seconds matter. Police do not have the luxury of pausing a shooting response to calculate how a court may later weigh the suspect’s race-specific lived experience.
That is why this case reaches beyond one D.C. defendant. It is about whether the law gives officers one constitutional rule they can follow, or a shifting standard that changes as soon as the encounter begins.
Think about what that means for a cop responding to gunfire. He has seconds to decide whether someone is free to leave or being detained.
Now add a rule that the answer can shift based on the suspect’s race and assumed lived experience. That creates two systems where the Constitution should provide one.
Alito and Thomas understand the stakes for the people who run toward the sound of shots. The same people who pulled a stolen gun off the street in this case.
President Trump spent his terms putting judges on the bench who read the Constitution as written, not as rewritten by activist courts. Alito and Thomas are exactly the kind of voices that legacy depends on.
Denying review is not the end of this fight. Sooner or later the Court will have to settle whether the Fourth Amendment means the same thing for everyone, and these two justices have already drawn the line.
What are your thoughts?
