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Reasonable Suspicion And Mere Hunches, Craig S. Lerner

Vanderbilt Law Review

In Terry v. Ohio, Earl Warren held that police officers could temporarily detain a suspect, provided that they relied upon "specific, reasonable inferences," and not simply upon an "inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or 'hunch."' Since Terry, courts have strained to distinguish "reasonable suspicion," which is said to arise from the cool analysis of objective and particularized facts, from "mere hunches," which are said to be subjective, generalized, unreasoned and therefore unreliable. Yet this dichotomy between facts and intuitions is built on sand. Emotions and intuitions are not obstacles to reason, but indispensable heuristic devices that allow people to process diffuse, …