Seizing the Vehicle Itself

Seizing the Vehicle Itself

Every application of the automobile exception so far has concerned what is inside a car. When officers have probable cause to believe a vehicle contains contraband, they may search it without a warrant, and the authority extends to containers in the car where the objects sought might be concealed.¹ Florida v. White changes the object of the inquiry from the car's contents to the car itself, and asks whether officers may take a vehicle without a warrant when the vehicle is the forbidden thing.² The Court answered yes, provided the officers have probable cause to believe the vehicle is contraband subject to forfeiture (property the government may take because of how it was used in a crime) and take it from a public place.³ That answer rests on two supports, one historical and one tied to the setting of the seizure, and this section takes the facts first and then each support in turn.

The facts show how the question arose. Officers watched White use his car to deliver cocaine on three separate occasions, which gave them probable cause to believe the car was forfeitable under the Florida Contraband Forfeiture Act. Several months later they arrested him at his workplace on unrelated charges and, acting under that Act, seized the car from his employer's parking lot without a warrant. An inventory of the seized car turned up cocaine, and White moved to suppress it on the ground that the seizure was unlawful. The Florida Supreme Court sided with him on the seizure. It recognized that under Carroll the police could have searched the car without a warrant if they had probable cause to believe it contained contraband, but it drew a line between an immediate search of a movable car on actual knowledge that it then holds contraband and a discretionary seizure of a car on the belief that it may have been used at some time in the past to assist illegal activity.⁴ The Supreme Court disagreed and reversed.⁵

The difference between the two questions is the core of the case. The officers in White lacked probable cause to believe the car contained contraband, so the search authority of Carroll was unavailable to them, but they did have probable cause to believe the vehicle itself was contraband under Florida law.⁶ Carroll and Ross ask whether something unlawful is in the car, and the probable cause they require is aimed at the contents. White asks whether the car is the unlawful thing, so the probable cause it requires is aimed at the vehicle. The Supreme Court found that the principles behind Carroll reach this seizure as well, even though the Florida court had treated a seizure based on past use as a different matter from a search based on present knowledge.⁷

The first support is founding-era practice, the same source Carroll drew on. The Court begins, as it does in Fourth Amendment cases generally, by asking whether the action was regarded as an unlawful search or seizure when the Amendment was framed.⁸ Carroll answered that question for car searches by pointing to statutes of the First, Second, and Fourth Congresses that let federal officers search ships without a warrant and seize concealed goods subject to duties.⁹ Those same statutes carry weight in White, because they authorized the warrantless seizure of both the goods subject to duties and the ships on which the goods were concealed.¹⁰ A ship is the closest founding-era counterpart of a car, since either can leave the jurisdiction while an officer goes to find a magistrate. The Court reasoned that the need to seize readily movable contraband before it is spirited away underlies the old statutes, and that the need is equally weighty when the automobile, rather than its contents, is the contraband the police seek to secure.¹¹ If the car is the very thing the government wants, waiting for a warrant risks losing the object of the seizure itself.

The second support looks to where the seizure happens. Fourth Amendment doctrine has consistently given officers more latitude in public places than on private premises: a warrant is presumptively required for a felony arrest inside a suspect's home, yet an officer with probable cause may arrest a felony suspect in a public place without one.¹² The Court applied the same distinction between an open area and private premises to the seizure of property, and found the facts nearly indistinguishable from G. M. Leasing Corp. v. United States, where federal agents took cars from public streets, parking lots, and other open places without invading anyone's privacy.¹³ White's car was taken from his employer's parking lot, so the seizure intruded on no private space, and the Court concluded that no warrant was required.¹⁴ The reason follows from what a warrant does. It places a magistrate between an officer and a private space the officer wants to enter, and an officer who takes an object from an open lot enters no such space, so probable cause remains the only safeguard the situation needs. The inventory search that followed is taught in its own reading; here it matters only because the cocaine it found was admissible when the seizure that preceded it was lawful.¹⁵

Only the location changed between the two versions, and that single fact moved the answer. Probable cause that the vehicle is contraband is necessary in both, but it supplies the justification for a warrantless seizure only where the setting is public. The later section on the curtilage limit develops how far a home's protection reaches onto a driveway and the area around the house.

The case drew a concurrence from Justice Souter and a dissent from Justice Stevens, and both writings mark limits worth carrying into an exam answer.¹⁶ Justice Souter cautioned that a state's use of the word contraband in its forfeiture statute does not by itself justify a warrantless seizure. The caution has a structural basis: if a legislature's label controlled, a state could widen officers' power to take property without a warrant simply by declaring more kinds of property forfeitable, and the Fourth Amendment would protect only what the state chose to leave out. The authority for the seizure in White comes from the two supports above, the historical practice with movable contraband and the public setting of the seizure. The dissent pressed two concerns about the rule. The first was delay, since the officers had probable cause months before they took the car, which weakens the claim that they had to act before the car was spirited away. The second was incentive, since officers and agencies that bring property into forfeiture may have a stake in the outcome. Neither concern changed the result in White, so an answer should rest the seizure on probable cause that the vehicle itself is forfeitable plus the public location, and should flag the label and delay concerns where the facts press them.

The usual error is treating a search of the car and a seizure of the car as one question. A student who sees a car and a drug history may reach for the search rule and ask whether drugs are probably inside, when the fact pattern is really asking whether the car itself may be taken. The seizure rule has its own trigger, probable cause that the vehicle is contraband, and its own setting requirement, a public place.