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590 Pa. 390

912 A.2d 1265

Commonwealth v. Mistler

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Decided December 27, 2006

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 2006-12-27

Relies on Terry v. Ohio · Commonwealth v. Beaman

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 2006-12-27

How this case has been cited

Cited by 53 later decisions — most recently March 2021 · most notably Commonwealth v. Jones (2010), Commonwealth v. Briggs (2011)

53 state decisions

310200620102020decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Justice BALDWIN,

¶1concurring.

¶2I join the majority opinion. I agree that there was no reasonable suspicion to detain the Appellees. It is clear from the record that the officers investigating the party lacked reasonable suspicion that any of the Appellees were consuming alcohol in violation of the underage drinking statute, 18 Pa.C.S. § 6308(a). I write separately because I find, as the Superior Court found, the analysis to resolve the instant matter need only encompass a review of reasonable suspicion.

¶3“[A] seizure that is less intrusive than a traditional arrest,” in order to be reasonable, “must ordinarily be supported by reasonable suspicion, based upon objective facts, that the individual is involved in criminal activity.” Commonwealth v. *406Beaman, 588 Pa. 636, 642-43, 880 A.2d 578, 582 (2005). Indeed, we have noted that the United States Supreme Court “emphasized] the centrality of the individualized suspicion requirement [in] Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” when it established the reasonable suspicion exception in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21 n. 18, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 1880 n. 18, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). Here, there are no such objective facts in the record to indicate the officers had individualized reasonable suspicion.

¶4As such, this matter presents no cause to address suspicion-less, general searches or to engage in analysis of a different standard applied to large groups detained without individualized suspicion.

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