Vehicle Searches Before Gant

Vehicle Searches Before Gant

The reach test from Chimel works comfortably when an arrest happens in a room, where a table, a drawer, and a doorway mark off what an arrestee could grab. A car is harder, because its interior is one small enclosure that the arrestee can sit in, step out of, or be led away from within seconds. The same arrestee may be inside the zone of reach at one moment and ten feet outside it at the next. An officer deciding at the roadside whether the back seat is open to search would have to guess where the arrestee could have reached, and a wrong guess puts the evidence at risk of suppression. The Court's answer was to replace the case-by-case reach question for cars with a categorical rule about the passenger compartment, and the two sub-sections below describe that rule and its extension.¹

Those sub-sections describe the law as it stood before Arizona v. Gant. New York v. Belton set the bright-line rule, which treated the passenger compartment as searchable incident to the arrest of an occupant of the car.² Thornton v. United States then carried that rule to an arrestee whom the officer first met after the arrestee had already left the car.³ A categorical rule has an evident appeal: officers know in advance what they may search, and the citizen can know it too, because neither has to litigate the arrestee's reach in every stop. The price was that the rule authorized searches of places an arrestee could not possibly reach, so it reached compartments where neither of the dangers behind the exception was present.

Gant later limited this broad practice to circumstances where the arrestee can access the vehicle or evidence of the offense may be inside.⁵ The rules in the next two sub-sections are therefore the background against which Gant is written, and the section after them shows which parts of the old authority survive. Students lose this issue when they apply Belton's automatic compartment search to a present-day traffic arrest as though it were still the governing test. The first sub-section takes up that rule as the Court stated it.

Belton's Bright-Line Rule

The Chimel reach test asks what area an arrestee could grab at the moment of arrest, and a car strains that question because its interior is small and its occupants are often outside it by the time police act. New York v. Belton answered with a categorical rule: when police make a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, they may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment.⁶ The rule has a second half that matters just as much on an exam. Police may also examine the contents of any container found in the passenger compartment, whether the container is open or closed.⁷

The facts show how little the rule demanded of the officer. A New York trooper chased down a speeding car on the Thruway and found four men inside, none of whom owned the car or was related to its owner. He smelled burnt marijuana and saw on the floor an envelope marked "Supergold" that he associated with marijuana, so he ordered the men out and arrested all four for unlawful possession of marijuana.⁸ He patted each man down and split them into four separate areas of the roadway so that none could touch another, then searched each man and finally the passenger compartment, where a black leather jacket belonging to Belton lay on the back seat.⁹ The trooper unzipped a pocket of the jacket and found cocaine, and the Court upheld the search.¹⁰

The Court reached the rule by way of a problem of administration. For a search of the arrestee's person it had already adopted a simple rule in United States v. Robinson: a full search after a lawful custodial arrest is reasonable, and courts do not litigate in each case whether one of the Chimel dangers was actually present.¹¹ For car interiors no such rule had emerged, and lower courts were reaching conflicting results on comparable facts when they asked whether police could search inside a car after the arrestees had left it.¹² The Court saw a further cost in that confusion, because a person who cannot predict how a court will apply a settled principle cannot know the scope of his constitutional protection, and an officer cannot know the scope of his authority.¹³ Its solution was a generalization: articles inside the narrow space of the passenger compartment are, as a general matter though not in every case, within the area an arrestee might reach to grab a weapon or evidentiary item.¹⁴ The Court then read Chimel's immediate-control limit in light of that generalization, and the compartment rule is the result.¹⁵

The container holding follows from the same generalization. If the compartment is within the arrestee's reach, then so are the containers inside it, and a jacket pocket or a closed bag is as reachable as the seat on which it lies.¹⁶ The container rule does not depend on the arrestee lacking a privacy interest in a closed container; the arrestee keeps that interest, and the lawful custodial arrest is what justifies the intrusion on it.¹⁷ Michigan v. Long later described Belton in the same terms, as a rule adopted to give a workable answer for the passenger compartment, together with the power to examine open or closed containers found there.¹⁸

A rule that skips the question whether the arrestee could actually reach anything may seem at odds with an exception built on dangers to officers and evidence, so the reason for it needs spelling out. The gain is predictability. An officer at the roadside has seconds to decide what may be opened, and a rule that turned on where each arrestee stood would put the officer's guess about reach on trial at a suppression hearing, with the evidence at risk if the guess missed. The categorical rule let the officer know beforehand where the authority ran, and let a court apply it without reconstructing who stood where along a highway shoulder.¹⁹

The cost lay in the same categorical quality. Because the rule reached the compartment whether or not the arrestee was near it, critics argued that it produced results broader than case-by-case application of Chimel would, and that it allowed wide searches of vehicles without probable cause to believe evidence was inside.²⁰ They also saw an incentive problem: an officer who lacked grounds to search a car could wait for a minor offense by an occupant, make an arrest, and search the compartment as an incident of it.²¹ The Court's later refusal in Arkansas v. Sullivan to entertain challenges based on an officer's actual motives for an arrest left little room to police that temptation.²²

The rule is also bounded by its own generalization. The reasoning concerned the passenger compartment and the containers in it, so the trigger is a lawful custodial arrest of an occupant and the reach of the search is that compartment.²³ Students lose this issue when they treat the arrest as a license to search the whole car.

The twin shows which fact moved the answer: the stop, the arrest, and the trooper are the same, and only the area searched changed. The compartment fits the reasoning about reach, and the trunk does not.

The facts of Belton also contain the weakness that the dissent identified. By the time the trooper searched the jacket, he had ordered all four men out of the car, patted them down, and separated them along the roadway.²⁴ The dissent's objection was that, with the men removed and spread out in that way, none of them could have reached a jacket on the back seat, so neither danger behind the exception was realistically present when the compartment was searched. The Court later accepted the principle behind that objection in Arizona v. Gant: if there is no possibility that an arrestee could reach the area police want to search, both justifications for the exception are absent and the exception does not apply.²⁵ Gant therefore limited the automatic compartment search, and its two prongs are taken up in the sections that follow, so the rule here is the one the Court stated in 1981 and the reasoning that supported it.

Thornton and Recent Occupants

The Belton rule was phrased in terms of the occupant of an automobile, and the trooper in Belton made contact with the men while they were still in the car. Many arrests unfold differently, because a driver may park, get out, and be standing beside the car before any officer speaks to the driver. Thornton v. United States presented that situation. Thornton had parked and left his car of his own accord before the officer approached him; drugs were then found on his person, he was arrested, and a search of his car turned up a firearm.²⁷ He moved to suppress the firearm as the product of an unconstitutional search, and the question for the Court was whether Belton is limited to arrests in which the officer initiates contact while the arrestee is still in the car.²⁸

Thornton's position can be called a contact-initiation rule, because it would make the officer's power to search the compartment depend on whether the officer reached the person before or after the person left the vehicle.²⁹ The Fourth Circuit rejected the argument and affirmed, relying in part on Thornton's concession that he was in close proximity to his car in both time and space, so that the car was within his immediate control.³⁰ The Supreme Court affirmed as well, holding that the Fourth Amendment permits a vehicle search incident to the arrest of a recent occupant even if the arrestee is no longer in the car when the search is conducted.³¹ Belton therefore applies to occupants and recent occupants alike.³²

The Court's reasoning has a functional strand and a practical strand. The functional strand starts from what Belton had actually relied on: the Court had placed no weight on the trooper's having ordered the occupants out or having made contact while they were inside, so a rule that turns on those facts has no logical connection to Belton's rationale.³³ What produces the danger is the arrest itself, with its proximity, stress, and uncertainty, and an arrestee standing beside a car is no less able to lunge for a weapon or destroy evidence than one sitting in it.³⁴ Because the same safety and evidence concerns exist in both settings, applying two different rules to what is at bottom one situation would make little sense.³⁵

The practical strand concerns the incentives a contact-initiation rule would create. An officer may sensibly decide to hold back until a suspect has stepped out of the car, since confronting someone who is outside the vehicle can be safer and more effective. Under Thornton's proposal those officers would lose the compartment search after a custodial arrest, which would expose them to danger and leave evidence at risk of concealment or destruction, and the Court declined to impose that gamble.³⁶ Such a rule would also blur the line Belton drew, because the officer would have to judge in the moment, and a court would later have to decide, whether contact was achieved before the person stepped out.³⁷

The two cases differ in a single fact. In Belton the officer reached the occupants while they were in the car and ordered them out, and in Thornton the arrestee left the car on his own before the officer made contact. The Court held that this difference does not change the answer. What the rule does not relax is the requirement of an arrest: an officer may search a vehicle under Belton only if the suspect is arrested.³⁸

The stop, the officer, and the car are the same as in Thornton, and only the arrest has dropped out. Students lose this issue when they treat recency as a substitute for the arrest, so the first question for any vehicle search is whether the facts show a custodial arrest of the occupant or recent occupant at all.

Gant kept the recent-occupant language but removed the automatic search. Police may now search the passenger compartment incident to a recent occupant's arrest only if it is reasonable to believe that the arrestee might access the vehicle at the time of the search or that the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest.³⁹ The Court described that holding as consistent with Thornton, and it took the evidence-of-offense condition from Justice Scalia's opinion concurring in the judgment in Thornton.⁴⁰ A search on Thornton's facts would therefore no longer be justified merely because he had recently been in the car. It would have to satisfy one of the two Gant conditions, for example by showing that he could still reach the car, or that it was reasonable to believe the car held evidence of the drug offense for which he was arrested. The next section takes up those two conditions in turn.