In 2017, police officers in Maryland went to the home of law professor Fareed Hayat to investigate a bystander’s report of seeing a Black man placing children in the trunk of a Tesla vehicle in a restaurant parking lot. Although Teslas have rear-facing seats, the caller reported the incident as a potential kidnapping. When police officers approached Professor Hayat’s home, he spoke to them from his porch, explaining that there was no kidnapping and that the police could not enter his home without a warrant. As Hayat ended the conversation and tried to reenter his home, the officers shoved their way inside, handcuffing him and bloodying his lip, before confirming that the children in the home were fine and no kidnapping had occurred.

Professor Hayat sued the officers and the county for violating his rights, but a divided panel of the Fourth Circuit upheld the dismissal of his case. The panel ruled that the officers had the necessary “reasonable suspicion” to temporarily stop and question Hayat on his porch under the 1968 Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio, and that Hayat’s attempt to reenter his home justified the officers’ decision to force their way inside to “complete” this stop. Hayat sought rehearing from the full Fourth Circuit, and in October 2026, CAC filed an amicus brief in support of Hayat’s petition for rehearing. Our brief explains that the panel’s decision was wrong for two reasons.

First, the panel’s decision flatly contradicts Supreme Court precedent on warrantless home intrusions by police. According to the panel, “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity involving risk of injury allows police officers to “extend” a so-called Terry stop into a person’s home without a warrant. Yet the Supreme Court has clearly held that more than suspicion is necessary to justify warrantless home entry. Officers can force their way into homes to provide emergency aid only when there is “an objectively reasonable basis for believing” that an occupant is imminently threatened with harm. And the surroundings of a person’s home—like Professor Hayat’s porch in this case—are protected from unreasonable searches under the Fourth Amendment just like the home itself. For that reason, every other federal circuit to address this question has prohibited warrantless Terry stops in these protected surroundings.

Second, warrantless entry based on reasonable suspicion alone is at odds with the common law safeguards that the Fourth Amendment was designed to preserve. In the Founding era, the common law offered strong protections against warrantless government intrusions into the home, often referred to as a person’s “castle.” At common law, officers could forcibly enter homes without warrants only in a few specifically recognized situations. And each of these situations required, at a minimum, probable cause to believe that immediate entry was essential. The Framers of the Fourth Amendment were chiefly concerned with maintaining these common law safeguards and protecting the security of the home. The intrusion into the Hayats’ home was therefore at odds with not only modern precedent but also the text and history of the Fourth Amendment.