U.S. Supreme Court limits car searches.

• Author: Ziemer, David

Byline: David Ziemer

Police may not search a car incident to the driver's arrest, after he is handcuffed and placed in the squad car, unless it is reasonable to expect that evidence of the offense of arrest will be found in the car.

That April 21 holding by the U.S. Supreme Court effectively overturns some Wisconsin precedents allowing police to conduct such searches whenever they arrest the driver.

In the U.S. Supreme Court case, Arizona v. Gant, Rodney Gant was arrested for driving with a suspended license, handcuffed, and locked in the back of a patrol car. Police then searched the car and found cocaine.

The Arizona Supreme Court held the search was unlawful, and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, in an opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens.

The court acknowledged that one of its own precedents, New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981), has been widely understood to allow a vehicle search incident to the arrest of a recent occupant even if there is no possibility the arrestee could gain access to the vehicle at the time of the search.

Those interpretations are based on the following language in Belton: [W]e hold that when a policeman has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, he may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of that automobile. Belton, at 460.

However, the court rejected those interpretations and limited its broad statement in Belton.

We now know that articles inside the passenger compartment are rarely 'within the area into which an arrestee might reach,' and blind adherence to Belton's faulty assumption would authorize myriad unconstitutional searches, Stevens wrote. The doctrine of stare decisis does not require us to approve routine constitutional violations.

Applying the standard to Gant, the court held the search incident to arrest unconstitutional.

Handcuffed and locked in a squad car, the court found he could not pose any threat to the officers. Also, while the defendant in Belton had been arrested for a drug offense, Gant was only arrested for driving with a suspended license, and thus, the police could not expect to find evidence of the crime in Gant's car.

Justice Antonin G. Scalia wrote a concurrence, arguing that the lead opinion's standard invites officers not to secure suspects, in order to justify a search incident to arrest.

I would hold that a vehicle search incident to arrest is ipso facto 'reasonable' only when the object of the search is...