I used to say that whenever a search occurred involving a car, it was legal. It was not even worth reviewing the facts. When judges heard the word “car” or “vehicle” they turned off their analytical minds and sustained the search. Why? Because for a generation, that was the way the law was. But the law always seemed to be amiss. It appeared to be at odds with the rationale for permitting such searches: safety and safeguarding evidence. But that was the law.
Well, things changed on April 21, 2008 when the Supreme Court of the United States took another look at the “automobile exception” and carved out new law for judges to follow. In an article entitled, Supreme Court Cuts Back Officers’ Searches of Vehicles, The New York Times reported, “Police officers have for a generation understood themselves to be free to search vehicles based on nothing more than the fact that they had just arrested an occupant. That principle ‘has been widely taught in police academies’ and ‘law enforcement officers have relied on the rule in conducting vehicle searches during the past 28 years.’”
Law enforcement officials were not happy. “’It’s just terrible,’ William J. Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said of the decision. ‘It’s certainly going to result in less drug and weapons cases being made.’”
“In a dissent, four justices said the majority had overruled an important and straightforward Fourth Amendment precedent established by the court in a 1981 decision, New York v. Belton.”
The majority of the court denied that. They said that the previous case (Belton) dealing with automobile searches had been applied too broadly. From now on vehicle searches will be allowed only in two situations: “when the person being arrested is close enough to the car to reach in, possibly to grab a weapon or tamper with evidence; or when the arresting officer reasonably believes that the car contains evidence pertinent to the very crime that prompted the arrest.”
“In the case decided, [April 21, 2009], Rodney J. Gant, an Arizona man, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for driving with a suspended license. He was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car while his car was searched.
“The police found cocaine and a gun, and Mr. Gant was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to three years. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the search of the car had violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and suppressed the evidence against him. The United States Supreme Court affirmed that decision on Tuesday.
“The court had agreed to hear the case because the conventional view of the [previous] decision, (New York v. Belton) had been widely criticized. ‘The chorus that has called for us to revisit Belton,’ Justice Stevens wrote, ‘includes courts, scholars and members of this court who have questioned that decision’s clarity and fidelity to Fourth Amendment principles (the United States constitution’s amendment dealing with searches).’
“Police officers and lower courts, [the court] wrote, had failed to take adequate account of the two rationales that animated [the Belton decision]: protecting the safety of arresting officers and safeguarding evidence of crimes. Those rationales only make sense, [the court] said, ‘when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance’ of the car.
“At the same time, the majority announced a new justification for a search in connection with an arrest . . . ‘when it is reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle.’
“As a practical matter, that means many arrests for traffic offenses will not by themselves allow police officers to search vehicles. Arrests for other kinds of crimes, though, may well supply a basis for a search.
“’Countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious that a traffic violation,’ [said the Court], ‘have had their constitutional right to the security of their private effects violated’ by the broad rule struck down on Tuesday.”
About time!
(Quotations from Supreme Court Cuts Back Officers’ Searches of Vehicles, New York Times, April 21, 2009.)