A Civil Rights Lesson with Profs Mason and Carter

I just recently stumbled on a Saint Louis University Law Journal article by Associate Professor Caleb Mason entitled “JAY-Z’S 99 PROBLEMS, VERSE 2: A CLOSE READING WITH FOURTH AMENDMENT GUIDANCE FOR COPS AND PERPS” which is exactly what it says on the tin: a line-by-line breakdown of the police encounter in “99 Problems”.

It is also totally awesome.

For reference, in case you didn’t immediately read the article after that freaking sweet title or don’t have the verse committed to memory: YouTube link to the verse.

Now, it’s worth saying: we don’t have the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to protect crack dealers and drug traffickers. Although that’s a side effect, the point of enumerating those rights is to protect against the overreach of the police, whose lawful power can become coercive very easily. (If you don’t think that police overreach is a problem in this country, my friend Radley Balko would like to have a word with you.)

It’s important to know your rights because you will inevitably come in to contact with the police in some way (most likely a traffic stop) and regular review of your rights is the only way to be sure you’ll be able to know them on demand in the high-stress situation of sitting on the side of the road with the blue lights flashing. You may not have even been breaking the law, you just got caught up in cash-hungry cops trying to get a little extra civil forfeiture dough. Just to be clear, this isn’t about covering up briefcases of crack in your trunk like Jay-Z; even when innocent you should know and assert your rights. Okay, enough of that.

So how do you stay fresh on your rights? Well, aside from listening to The Black Album often (The Jay-Z one, not the Metallica one), this article is a pretty entertaining way. It’s filled with a sort of dry humor that keeps the whole thing pretty entertaining:

Memorialization of the stated basis for the stop is important because the government must be able to show that the stop was based on probable cause, and you’ll be able to put the cop on the stand. So if you later develop evidence that you were not in fact doing what the officer said you were at the time, the officer will either have to fight the evidence, or else come up with a different basis for the stop, in which case he’ll have to contradict his contemporaneous explanation. This can happen, and judges find it most displeasing.

What I found particularly interesting about the article was that it resolved a rights question I had that I couldn’t recall ever seeing answered: at a traffic stop, if the cop tells you to get out of your car, are you legally required to? As it turns out, unless you are lucky with Jay-Z’s method (“I ain’t stepping out of shit all my papers legit”, not recommended.), the answer is yes. The discussion of the relevant lines of the verse even include a quote from a Supreme Court ruling to back it up.

Amusingly, it also turns out that Jay-Z, who throughout the rest of the verse was almost impeccably correct about handling things like the officer asking if he knew why he pulled him over, ends up being totally wrong about the police needing a warrant to get in to locked gloveboxes and trunks. As the journal article admits, however, this is probably because the line in the song was easier to rhyme with than something that included the nuance of probable cause.

At any rate, the article isn’t a comprehensive review of all your rights and procedures in every kind of police stop, but an illustrative look at a particular anecdotal traffic stop. Definitely worth a read if you need a laugh.