Recent Supreme Court Rulings - Kansas v. Glover

The second US Supreme Court case we’d like to discuss this spring is Kansas v. Glover.

Charles Glover, Jr., was driving a pickup truck when a police officer following him decided to run his license plate. Glover had given the officer no reason to pull him over; however, the vehicle was shown as registered to him and his driver’s license had been revoked. The officer, acting only on the assumption that the registered owner (Charles Glover) was driving the vehicle and with no other reason to stop the vehicle, initiated a traffic stop. Glover was indeed the driver of the vehicle and the officer charged him for being a habitual violator of Kansas’ traffic laws.

Glover moved to suppress the stop and all evidence seized as a result of the stop arguing that the officer had no grounds to pull him over and therefore violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The question before the US Supreme Court was whether it is reasonable for an officer to suspect that the registered owner of a vehicle is the operator of a vehicle absent any information to suggest that he is not. The Supreme Court ruled on this case on April 6, 2020, and held that when the officer lacks information negating an inference that the owner is driving the vehicle, an investigative traffic stop made after running a vehicle’s license plate and learning that the registered owner’s driver’s license has been revoked is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Essentially, this means that the defendant challenging the traffic stop bears the burden of showing that the officers inference is unreasonable.