The Supreme Court issued orders this morning from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices added just one new case to their merits docket for next term: Kansas v. Glover, in which the court agreed to decide whether, for purposes of an investigative stop under the Fourth Amendment, it is reasonable for a police officer to suspect that the registered owner of a car is in fact the person driving the car.
The case granted today arose when a Kansas sheriff’s deputy checked the registration on a pick-up truck and learned that the truck was registered to Charles Glover Jr. – whose driver’s license had been revoked. Based only on that information, the deputy decided to pull the truck over to investigate whether the driver had a valid driver’s license. Glover was indeed the driver and was charged with driving without a license, but he argued that the evidence from the stop should not be admitted against him because the deputy lacked the reasonable suspicion required by the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment cases.
The state countered that the deputy did have reasonable suspicion because he knew that the car’s owner did not have a valid driver’s license, and he could infer that the owner of the car would be the person driving it. But the Kansas Supreme Court disagreed, prompting the state to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed today to take up the case.
The justices did not act on several high-profile cases that they considered at last week’s conference, including the challenge to an Indiana law that bans abortions based on (among other things) the sex or disability of the fetus and requires fetal remains to be buried or cremated; a group of cases asking the justices to weigh in on whether federal employment discrimination laws protect LGBTQ employees; and a petition for review filed by an Oregon couple who declined, on religious grounds, to bake a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
The justices’ next conference is scheduled for April 12. Orders from that conference are likely to be released on Monday, April 15, at 9:30 am.
This post was also published on SCOTUSblog.
