Supreme Court upholds search

Listen to this article

In New York v. Belton, 453 U. S. 454 (1981), the U. S. Supreme Court took a hint from noted search and seizure guru and professor, Wayne La Fave, who observed: “ A highly sophisticated set of rules, qualified by all sorts of ifs, ands, and buts, and requiring the drawing of subtle nuances and hairline distinctions, may be the heady stuff upon which the facile minds of lawyers and judges eagerly feed, but they may be ‘literally impossible of application by the officer in the field.’” Id., at 458. The Belton court authorized search of the entire passenger compartment of a vehicle, including closed compartments, as incident to a contemporaneous custodial arrest of the vehicle’s occupant or occupants. Vehicle trunks are not included (id., at 460, n. 4), and no probable cause is needed to believe that the vehicle contains anything of evidentiary value.

Despite the Belton “bright line” rule, “ifs, ands, and buts” remained. One of the unsettled questions: What happens when the arrestee leaves his or her vehicle before the officer actually accosts the suspect? Put another way, when does the “occupant” of a car cease to be an “occupant?”

In Thornton v. United States, 2004 WL 1144370, decided May 24, a divided (5-4) Supreme Court held that the Belton rule applies even when the when the suspect is not in the vehicle before the officer has an opportunity to effect a stop.

Marcus Thornton was driving a Lincoln Town Car bearing plates listed to a 1982 Chevy. Norfolk, Virginia, police officer Deion Nichols noted the discrepancy. Before the officer could stop Thornton or signal him to stop, Thornton parked his car and got out. Nichols stopped Thornton while they were both on foot. Nichols asked Thornton if he could pat him down. Thornton consented and the officer noticed a bulge in Thornton’s pocket, a bulge which turned out to be marijuana and cocaine.

Nichols arrested Thornton, handcuffed him, and placed him in Nichols’ unmarked squad car.

Nichols searched the Lincoln Town Car and found a 9mm handgun under the driver’s seat. Thornton moved to suppress the handgun, arguing that Belton did not apply because he was no longer a vehicle “occupant.” The motion was denied and Thornton was convicted of various drug and gun related offenses.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed. The court noted the discrepancy among the federal circuits and state courts in interpreting Belton.

While supporting the majority view that Belton applies even when the suspect has already exited his vehicle before the arresting officer arrives, the court did remark that “[t]he Belton rule cannot be stretched sod as to render it limitless by permitting officers to search any vehicle from which an arrestee has emerged, regardless of how much time has elapsed since his exit or how far he is from the vehicle when arrested.” 325 F. 3d 189, 196 (4th Cir. 2003).

The Supreme Court also affirmed. Chief Justice William Rehnquist began the majority opinion by tracing development of the “search incident to an arrest” exception. In Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752 (1969), the court sanctioned the search of the arrestee’s person and “the area immediately surrounding him.” The search served two purposes: 1) to prevent the suspect from grabbing a weapon and 2) prevent the concealment or destruction of evidence. Belton adopted those two rationales.

Rehnquist refused to distinguish between “occupants” and “recent occupants” of a vehicle. He emphasized that “[t]he stress [of the arrest situation] is no less merely because the arrestee exited his car before the officer initiated contact, nor is an arrestee less likely to attempt to lunge for a weapon or to destroy evidence if he is outside of, but still in control of, the vehicle. In either case, the officer faces a highly volatile situation.”

Thornton proposed what Rehnquist styled as a “contact initiation” rule whereby “an officer approaching a suspect who has just alighted from his vehicle would have to determine whether he actually confronted or signaled confrontation with the suspect while he remained in the car, or whether the suspect exited his vehicle unaware of, and for reasons unrelated to, the officer’s presence.” The court observed that such a rule would be “inherently subjective and highly fact specific,” which is what the Belton “bright line” rule sought to avoid in the first place.

Rehnquist conceded that Thornton probably could not have reached under his seat to grab the gun once he was outside his car. Yet, “[t]he need for a clear rule, readily understood by police officers and not depending on differing estimates of what items were or were not within reach of an arrestee at any particular moment, justifies the sort of generalization which Belton enunciated.”

Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg concurred in the majority’s judgment, but not in its extension or amplification of Belton. Instead, they opined that probable cause existed to believe other drug contraband might exist in Thornton’s car, thereby justifying the search and discovery of the gun. Both justices were troubled by the fact that Thornton “was handcuffed and secured in the back of the officer’s squad car. The risk that he would nevertheless ‘grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m]’ from his car was remote in the extreme.”

Scalia rebuffed three reasons offered as to why Belton and Chimel should be applied in Thornton’s case. First, Thornton must have “possessed …the skill of Houdini and the strength of Hercules” to escape and grab his gun or destroy evidence in his car. Whereas the government attempted to cite instances where officer safety was compromised by handcuffed suspects who were able to secure weapons, only one case in the last 13 years involved a suspect who escaped from a police car and obtained a weapon (a fireplace poker) from a location other than the suspect’s own person or an officer. Further, Chimel only allowed a search of the area in the suspect’s immediate control, to which a nearby personal vehicle, such as in Thornton’s situation, would not apply.

Second, although it made sense to handcuff an arrestee and place him in the squad car for officer safety, sensible police procedures do not automatically justify a warrantless search. That is, a “Chimel search is not the Government’s right; it is an exception… .” Scalia pointed out that &#147
;if an officer leaves a suspect unrestrained nearby just to manufacture authority to search, one could argue that the search is unreasonable precisely because the dangerous conditions justifying it existed only by virtue of the officer’s failure to follow sensible procedures.” (Emphasis in original.)

Third, although Belton presented the “benefits of a bright-line rule,” the rationale behind the rule — that the “passenger compartment is ‘in fact generally, even if not inevitably,’ within the suspect’s immediate control” — is seriously flawed. Scalia approved the opinion of one judge, who stated: “ [I]n our search for clarity, we have now abandoned our constitutional moorings and floated to a place where the law approves of purely exploratory searches of vehicles during which officers with no definite objective or reason for the search are allowed to rummage around in a car to see what they might find.” (In that judge’s case, a Belton searched was commenced after the squad car containing the arrestee had already left five minutes earlier.)

	Related Links U.S. Supreme Court

Scalia stated that “if we are going to continue to allow Belton searches on stare decisis grounds, we should at least be honest about why we are doing so.” His solution? “[L]imit Belton searches to cases where it is reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle.”

Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter dissented. They argued that Belton was “concerned only with the narrow but common circumstance of a search occasioned by the arrest of a suspect who was seated in or driving an automobile at the time the law enforcement officer approached.” The dissenters would treat a driver or passenger of a vehicle, who was later arrested outside the car, the same as any other pedestrian, applying the rules of Chimel. Otherwise, they said, the extension of Belton creates confusion and erodes the bright line rule: “[W]e are not told how recent is recent, or how close is close” in determining when an arrestee is a “recent occupant” of a vehicle.

Wisconsin note: the Thornton case should not affect Wisconsin law. In State v. Goebel, 103 Wis. 2d 203, 217 (1981), the court ruled that the arrestee “need not be in the vehicle, or close by” to justify the search. State v. Fry, 131 Wis. 2d 153, 180 (1986), added that the arrestee must remain on site and the Belton type search must commence immediately. State v. Murdock, 155 Wis. 2d 217, 231 (1990) held that an arrestee need not have “actual accessibility” to weapons or evidence to justify the search incident to an arrest. State v. Pallone, 2000 WI 77, 236 Wis. 2d 162 (2000), reaffirmed Belton in the context of a custodial arrest for an ordinance violation and also justified the search of a vehicle passenger’s belongings as a “search incident” to the driver’s arrest.