Each year the U.S. Supreme Court returns to certain issues that it has decided in the past to reshape, redirect, or clarify with new cases that ask new questions. Search and seizure law is one such area of criminal law, and the courts have addressed this issue many times in an attempt to refine the requirements faced by police in conducting searches, in the admissibility of evidence seized during a search, in the need for a warrant for a search, and so on. In the 1992-1993 Supreme Court session, the Justices returned to this issue with a case from Minnesota, Minnesota v. Dickerson (113 S. Ct. 2130 [1993]). The Court had previously provided some exceptions to the requirement for a warrant for a search under "stop and frisk" provisions allowing a police officer to stop and question a person reasonably suspected of criminal activity and to search that person if the officer had a justifiable belief that the person was armed and dangerous. The office under such circumstances could search for and seize any weapons that the individual might be carrying. Another exception to the need for a warrant for a search was the "plain view" exception under which the frisking officer might seize non-weapon contraband that can be visually recognized at the time of a lawful search. In Minnesota v. Dickerson, the Supreme Court would grant another exception, this time one that would be called the "plain feel" corollary to the plain view doctrine. An examination of the decision indicates the social, political economic, and ideological underpinnings of the decision, as well as the fact of the case itself and the historical precedents that went into the making of the decision at the Supreme Court level.
The situation took place on November 9, 1989 in the evening. A Minneapolis police officer on patrol with another officer in a marked car observed Timothy Dickerson leaving an apartment building at which the officer had previously responded to compla...