Step out of the car . . . We now turn to the suspect’s interaction with the officer during a traffic stop. In the song, Jay-Z’s protagonist refuses the cop’s order to get out: “I ain’t stepping out of shit . . .” In the video, he remains in the car and the cop backs off. Well, this is a basic question, the sort a criminal lawyer can answer: Does a driver actually have the right to refuse an order to exit the vehicle during an ordinary traffic stop? Unfortunately for drivers, the answer here is an unequivocal “no,” straight from the Supreme Court: “[O]nce a motor vehicle has been lawfully detained for a traffic violation, the police officers may order the driver to get out of the vehicle without violating the Fourth Amendment’s proscription of unreasonable searches and seizures.”54
So the order to step out of the car is per se lawful; the lack of suspicion of anything beyond the traffic offense is irrelevant. Indeed, in Mimms, the case just quoted, the government conceded that there was no suspicion of any kind other than the traffic violation, and that it was simply the officer’s “practice” to order the driver out of the car whenever he made a traffic stop.55
