Supreme Court Case: The Illinois V. Wardlow Case

Is a person's sudden flight from identifiable police officer, patrolling a high crime area, suspicious to justify the officer's stop and frisk of that person? This was the question that the justices of the Supreme Court were addressing when they heard the argument of the case Illinois v. Wardlow on November 2, 1999. In March 1999, the Supreme Court upheld the murder convictions of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing. This made the Supreme Court want to expand the police’s rights to stop and frisk a person. Nine months later, the Supreme Court argued Illinois v. Wardlow case. The Illinois v. Wardlow case would become important because it expanded the ruling of a police stop and frisk. This means that the case had set a new precedent. The new precedent changed the original precedent established in the case of Terry v. Ohio. The facts of the Illinois v. Wardlow case are as follows. Sam Wardlow fled upon seeing police officers who were patrolling an area known for heavy narcotics trafficking. Two of the officers caught up with him, stopped him, and conducted a safe pat-down search for weapons. The officers discovered a handgun, so they arrested Wardlow. The Illinois Supreme Court “ . . . Threw out his conviction, saying that under the

Ohio. The facts of the Terry case are as follows. “Terry and two other men were observed by a . . . policeman in what the officer believed to be ‘casing a job, a stick-up.’ The officer stopped and frisked the three men, and found weapons on two of them. Terry was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon and sentenced to three years in jail” (Oyez). Terry lost the case. The court said that “the officer acted on more than a ‘hunch’ and that ‘a reasonably prudent man would have been warranted in believing [Terry] was armed and thus presented a threat to the officer's safety while he was investigating his suspicious behavior’”