Pubdate: Wed, 22 Apr 2009
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: A12
Copyright: 2009 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Adam Liptak
Note: The Supreme Court decision 
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-542.pdf

SUPREME COURT CUTS BACK OFFICERS' SEARCHES OF VEHICLES

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Tuesday significantly cut back the 
ability of the police to search the cars of people they arrest.

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, Justice John Paul 
Stevens acknowledged in his majority opinion, "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."

The majority replaced that bright-line rule with a more nuanced one, 
and law enforcement officials greeted it with dismay. "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 effectively 
overruled an important and straightforward Fourth Amendment precedent 
established by the court in a 1981 decision, New York v. Belton.

Justice Stevens denied that. The precedent of Belton had often been 
applied too broadly, he said. Vehicle searches should be allowed only 
in two situations, he wrote: 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 Tuesday, 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 Mr. Gant's 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.

Justice Stevens, joined by the unusual alliance of Justices Antonin 
Scalia, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 
said the court had agreed to hear the case because the conventional 
view of the Belton decision 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."

Police officers and lower courts, Justice Stevens wrote, had failed 
to take adequate account of the two rationales that animated Belton: 
protecting the safety of arresting officers and safeguarding evidence 
of crimes. Those rationales only make sense, he 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, one drawing on a 2004 
concurrence questioning Belton from Justice Scalia. Searches of 
vehicles are permissible, Justice Stevens said, "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.

The decision, Arizona v. Gant, No. 07-542, was the last to be issued 
from among the cases the court heard in its October sitting, and it 
was marked by an uneasy compromise that probably explains the delay.

Justice Scalia said he would have overruled Belton outright and 
substituted a rule that allowed searches of vehicles in connection 
with arrests only where the search seeks evidence of the crime for 
which the arrest was made or another one for which there is probable 
cause. He added that he joined the majority opinion to avoid a 4-1-4 
decision "that leaves the governing rule uncertain."

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined in full by Chief Justice John G. 
Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and for the most part by 
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said the broad Belton rule was sensible 
and easy to apply.

On the other hand, the new rule allowing searches for evidence of the 
crime that prompted the arrest, Justice Alito said, "is virtually 
certain to confuse law enforcement officers and judges for some time to come."

And the part of the majority opinion allowing searches only when the 
person arrested can reach the car "may endanger arresting officers," 
Justice Alito wrote.

Mr. Johnson of the police association explained the problem. "The 
case creates a temptation," he said, "for police to leave the 
occupant of a vehicle unsecured in the belief that they are now 
operating within the Fourth Amendment in terms of being able to 
search the vehicle."

Though Justice Stevens did not concede that Tuesday's decision 
overruled Belton, he did say that fidelity to precedent was no reason 
to allow constitutional violations to continue.

"Countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious that a traffic 
violation," he wrote, "have had their constitutional right to the 
security of their private effects violated" by the broad rule struck 
down on Tuesday. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake