District of Columbia v. R.W.

At around 2:00 a.m. on a winter morning in Washington, D.C., a Metropolitan Police officer responded to a dispatch call about a suspicious vehicle at a specific apartment building. As his marked patrol car pulled into the lot, two passengers immediately jumped out of the only occupied car there and ran off without any apparent provocation, leaving a door open. 

The 15-year-old driver, identified in court papers only as R.W., then began backing the car out of its space with the door still open. The officer drew his weapon, ordered R.W. out, and discovered the car was stolen. R.W. was adjudicated delinquent after a juvenile court denied his motion to suppress the evidence, arguing the officer lacked reasonable suspicion for the stop.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed, holding the officer lacked reasonable suspicion because the passengers' flight, standing alone, wasn't enough to justify stopping the driver. 

The Supreme Court took the unusual step of deciding the case without full briefing or oral argument, granting certiorari and issuing a per curiam opinion, meaning an unsigned opinion for the Court as a whole, on the very same day, April 20, 2026. This kind of summary reversal is reserved for cases the majority views as clear errors that don't require the normal months-long process.

The District of Columbia argued that the lower court had improperly evaluated each fact in isolation, such as treating the late-night dispatch, the passengers' unprovoked flight, and the driver's decision to keep backing out with a door open as separate, individually insufficient clues, rather than weighing the "totality of the circumstances" together as Fourth Amendment law requires. R.W., through his public defender, argued that the D.C. Court of Appeals had in fact considered the full picture and reasonably concluded that fleeing from police alone, particularly in a neighborhood where such encounters are common, does not automatically create reasonable suspicion to stop the person who stayed behind. 

Justice Jackson's dissent argued that the majority was essentially just second-guessing the lower court's careful, fact-specific weighing of the same circumstances, not correcting any clear legal error.

A 7-2 per curiam majority reversed, holding that considering the late-night dispatch call, the passengers' immediate unprovoked flight, and the driver's attempt to back the car out with a door open together, the officer plainly had reasonable suspicion to stop R.W. Justice Sotomayor indicated she would have denied review entirely, and Justice Jackson filed a dissent criticizing the majority for using the "extraordinary" tool of summary reversal on what she called an ordinary, fact-bound dispute the lower court was entitled to resolve as it did. 

For police departments and defense attorneys nationwide, the ruling reinforces that courts must weigh all the surrounding facts of a stop together rather than dismissing individual factors as insufficient on their own, a standard that in practice makes it harder for defendants to challenge stops built on a combination of ordinary, otherwise-innocent observations.