So, this sounds like the correct decision, but it’s a little weird that the court doesn’t seem all that interested in a question I’d have thought would be relevant to the analysis: What’s the normal level of traffic for that time and place?
https://twitter.com/OrinKerr/status/1486137300765462529
Like, if the roads are normally dead at that hour and this was one of the only two cars anywhere in the vicinity, that seems less unreasonable than if there’s normally modest traffic…
…because it goes to the reasonableness of the antecedent inference “One of these two cars is very likely to contain the robbers.” The court notes that the stop location was “near” an interstate, but that doesn’t in itself tell you a whole lot.
I suspect maybe the court didn’t get too granular about probabilities because it’s a short hop from that sort of reasoning to licensing profiling in heavily white areas. (Viz: There are normally a modest number of cars on the road, but few or none with Black drivers…)
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