The only thing worse than no decisions are hasty decisions without all the facts or enough time to consider them.
When a court declines to hear an appeal, they are simply saying that the below court handled the case appropriately. By choosing not to hear it, they ARE ruling on it by maintaining the lower courts decision.
To say that SCOTUS "refuses" to hear cases on Terry cases, they are saying that the lower courts were correct.
It's not like they are dodging their responsibilities when declining to hear an appeal. That's how the system works - otherwise literally every losing party would appeal every single case to the supreme court.
Beyond that, idea that justices wouldn't, even subconsciously, use the power to choose their own docket to favor their own policy preferences is just naive.
No, they emphatically are not.
When a courts with discretionary appellate jurisdiction (in the US federal judiciary that's mostly the Supreme Court) declines an appeal, it is not the same as saying the court below is right, its saying “we have limited time and this case and the question it presents isn't important enough for us to spend time reviewing in detail, either procedurally or on the merits”.
There are fairly well-known factors that influence decisions to take cases by the Supreme Court (the issue having a thin record at the apellate level being a negative factor, a conflict between the circuits on a question being a positive one, among many others) that have nothing to do with whether the case is right or wrong, but have more to do with whether it raises issues that have been well vetted and for which there is some urgency (as arises from inconsistent application of the law) to resolve.
> To say that SCOTUS "refuses" to hear cases on Terry cases, they are saying that the lower courts were correct.
No, they aren't.
> It's not like they are dodging their responsibilities when declining to hear an appeal.
In general, no, because making those decisions on hearing cases is their responsibility. The particular decisions can be instances of non-, mis-, or mal-feasance in those duties, though.
The point about the status quo is that when there's uncertainty about what the actual law is, law enforcement picks a side and goes with it, and everyone else has to live in that reality. When there's genuine ambiguity as to how the law is actually supposed to apply, the Supreme Court shouldn't be able to just deny cert because they like what the government picked and are therefore beneficiaries of the legal uncertainty.
The situation in which lower courts would ideally try and kick something like this up to the supreme court is exactly when they start saying things like this in their opinions: "We hold that Alexander’s claim on this point cannot overcome the officers’ qualified immunity, because “it was not clearly established that an individual has a First Amendment right to refuse to answer an officer’s questions during a Terry stop.” Surprisingly few courts have ruled on this precise issue; the parties point to no cases from this circuit directly on point. The sparse case law that does exist, however, indicates no consensus that a defendant has a First Amendment right not to answer an officer’s questions during a stop like the one at issue here."