A few minutes earlier, Slager had stopped Scott for driving with a broken taillight; now he was putting him to death.
Three years before Ferguson, the police chief in the small town of Eutawville killed a black man after an escalating series of events that began with a "broken taillight" infraction.
In its report, the department acknowledged that 59percentt of chases here were begun because a driver had committed a traffic violation like speeding, driving with a missing taillight or rolling through a stop sign.
Mr. Isidoro, wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat in his parents' kitchen, said he was still angry that his 25 years of work in the United States meant nothing; that being caught with a broken taillight on his vehicle and without immigration papers meant more than having two American sons — Jeffrey, 10, and his brother, Tommy Jefferson, 2, who was named after the family's favorite president.
The argument was that this stop, and others like it, were pretextual, that the police were pretending to be on routine traffic patrol but were really trying to catch drug dealers — impermissibly so, the argument went, because the police had no reason to suspect that a car with a broken taillight was carrying drugs.
In a 1996 decision, Whren v. United States, the court held that as long as the police activity was objectively reasonable -- stopping a car with a broken taillight, for example -- it was irrelevant whether that action was a pretext for another goal, like a search for drugs.
He suggests riding with a blinking taillight to increase visibility.
In 2012, he pulled over Leroy Cline for allegedly driving with a busted taillight.
On October 6 , 1976 Los Angeles police officers stopped Adolpho Lyons, a twenty-four year-old AmericanAmerican, for driving with a defective taillight.
Under new federal immigration policy, committing even the most minor of infractions, like driving with a broken taillight, can be grounds for deportation.
