§ 12.04 ROBINSON: THE TRAFFIC ARREST CASE

• Jurisdiction: North Carolina

§ 12.04. United States v. Robinson: The Traffic Arrest Case⁵⁵

[A] The Holding

Only four years after the high court handed down its opinion in Chimel v. California,⁵⁶but also after four changes in personnel on the Supreme Court, the justices decided United States v. Robinson.⁵⁷ Robinson focused on the issue of whether the police, as an incident to a lawful custodial arrest for a routine traffic violation, may search an arrestee although they have no reason to believe that weapons or criminal evidence will be found on him.

In Robinson, O, a District of Columbia police officer, observed R driving his automobile on a public road. Based on prior information, O had probable cause to believe that R was driving with a revoked operator's permit. O ordered R to pull over, after which he informed R that he was under arrest for "operating after revocation," an offense that required R's custodial arrest, pursuant to police department regulations.

Because District police procedures required him to do so, O searched R. First, O patted down the outside of R's clothing. O felt an object in R's breast pocket that he could not identify, but which he pulled out. It was a crumpled up cigarette package inside of which were objects that did not feel like cigarettes. O opened the package and found 14 gelatin capsules that contained heroin, which O seized, and which served as the basis for R's prosecution on drug possession charges.

The Court of Appeals ruled that the officer acted unconstitutionally by conducting the full search. It focused on the fact that the arrest was for a minor traffic offense, rather than for a serious crime. The court reasoned that O had no basis for believing that R was in possession of destructible evidence relating to the offense of driving with a revoked license. As for a concern for weapons, the Court of Appeals concluded that with a traffic offense a limited pat-down frisk was sufficient. As the frisk here did not disclose any object that felt like a weapon, the subsequent full searches (pulling out the cigarette package, and then opening it) were impermissible.

The Supreme Court, per Justice Rehnquist, rejected this analysis. It discounted as speculative the assumption that people who violate traffic laws are less likely to possess dangerous weapons than those arrested for more serious crimes. However, its "more fundamental disagreement" with the lower court was with the latter's view that, as the Supreme Court put it, "there must be litigated in...