§ 12.03 CALIFORNIA: SETTING THE RULE'S CONTOURS

• Jurisdiction: United States

§ 12.03. Chimel v. California: Setting the Rule's Contours⁴⁸

Chimel v. California⁴⁹ is the benchmark search-incident-to-lawful-arrest case. In Chimel, the police, armed with an arrest warrant but without a search warrant, arrested C in his three-bedroom home for burglary. After the arrest, the officers searched the entire premises, including the attic, garage, and a small workshop, for evidence connected to the crime. Various items were seized. The police contended that the warrantless search should be permitted on the ground that it was incident to the lawful arrest.

Justice Potter Stewart delivered the opinion of the Court. He conceded that the prior law bearing on the issue was "far from consistent." Stewart detailed the Court's four decades of twists and turns in SILA, including twists—Harris v. United States and United States v. Rabinowitz⁵⁰—in which the Court authorized searches as broad in scope as that which occurred in Chimel. In Chimel, the Court took another turn. It ruled, 7-2, that, as incident to an arrest, the police may conduct a warrantless search of the arrestee and the area in his immediate control, but that they may not search the entire house without a warrant.

The majority's treatment of the issue is illustrative of the Supreme Court's approach to search warrant cases generally in the 1960s and early 1970s.⁵¹ The analysis centered on the Fourth Amendment Warrant Clause and the majority's belief that, in general, warrantless searches are per se unreasonable ("the Constitution requires a magistrate to pass on the desires of the police before they violate the privacy of the home"⁵²). Accordingly, a warrantless search is prohibited unless the government demonstrates that an exigency made the warrantless conduct imperative. As the Court stated, "the burden is on those seeking [an] exemption [from the requirement] to show the need for it. . . ." Justice Stewart also stated that when a warrant exception is recognized, it "must be "strictly tied to and justified by" the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible."⁵³ Put somewhat differently, an exception to the warrant requirement should be defined as narrowly as possible, and the exception should not apply to situations in which the justification for the exception is absent.

In the case of a search incident to an arrest, the Court concluded that a warrantless search of an arrestee is justified in order to remove any weapons that he might seek to use in order to resist arrest or...