| Court: | US Supreme Court |
| Facts: | Dickerson is acts evasively around the cops, so they decide to stop and investigate. They pat him down, and there's a lump in his pocket. They realized, by feel, that it might be drugs, and so it turned out to be. Charged with possession of a controlled substance. |
| Posture: | Guilty at trial, with the drugs admitted, in spite of a motion to suppress. MN Supreme Court suppresses the evidence. State appeals. |
| Issue: | Does the Fourth Amendment permit the seizure of contraband detected by touch during a protective patdown search? |
| Holding: | No. MN Supreme Court is affirmed. |
| Rule: | If the search stayes with the bounds authorized by Terry, it is OK; otherwise it is not. |
| Reasoning: | Terry is the standard for stop-and-frisk. The officers were lawfully present in the pocket in order to look for weapons. They didn't think this was a weapon, so there was no grounds for pulling it out of his pocket, which was the point at which they realized it was cocaine. There's no "plain touch" exception analogous to plain view. |
| Dicta: | |