Note about holiday blogging schedule: Because I am certain that all of you are planning your holidays around this blog, I thought I'd mention that I'll continue to post daily through the holidays, except for Christmas Eve and Christmas, and New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Today's post: The North Carolina Supreme Court recently reversed the court of appeals in State v. Morton. (The supreme court's opinion is here, but it simply adopts a portion of the dissent in the court of appeals, which you can read here.) Morton got me thinking about the following question: if an officer is engaged in a consensual encounter with a person whom the officer has reason to suspect is armed and dangerous, may the officer frisk the person? This has to come up all the time. For example, in Morton, two officers engaged in what both appellate courts agreed was a consensual conversation with a person they suspected of a murder. I'm changing the facts of Morton a little bit, but suppose that the officers had no reason to believe that the person was committing any crime at the time of the conversation, but that they did have reason to believe that the person was armed and dangerous. Maybe they saw a bulge at his hip suggestive of a gun, or perhaps they'd dealt with him in the past and knew him to carry a weapon. Under those facts, would the officers be permitted to frisk the person for their safety during the [...]
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