“Ignorance of the law is no excuse” – except when you’re a police officer. That’s essentially the argument the state of North Carolina made to the U.S. Supreme Court last week when it defended the drug conviction of a man whose car was stopped by police based on a misunderstanding of a state traffic law.

When an officer in the Surry County Sheriff’s Department saw a car with a broken right brake light, he pulled it over and told the occupants he was citing them “for a nonfunctioning brake light.” Apparently suspicious, the officer asked the owner of the car, Nicholas Heien, if he could search it.

The search turned up a sandwich bag containing cocaine, and Heien was arrested. But North Carolina law says that no person may operate a motor vehicle “unless it shall be equipped with a stop lamp on the rear of the vehicle.” Heien’s car had “a” working brake light – the left one. The issue for the North Carolina courts, and now for the Supreme Court, is whether the stop was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

Because traffic codes are filled with minor and sometimes arcane requirements, it’s already too easy for police to stop a car ostensibly because of a minor infraction but actually because they have a hunch that the vehicle contains drugs or other evidence of a serious crime. It would undermine the protections of the Fourth Amendment even more if police could stop and possibly search a car because of a violation of a law that existed only in the officer’s mind. The Supreme Court must hold law enforcement to a higher standard.

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