Vehicle Searches Incident To Arrest

Hey, you can't search my car, you don't have a search warrant!"

That statement is being said to some cop somewhere in this country as you are reading this. While it is likely some people who are contacted by the police have more experience with the law than the cop who contacted them, their criminal record hardly makes them lawyers. The basic rule is that all searches require a search warrant....except for the almost countless exceptions. Many years ago now, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a search of a motor vehicle made by officers after a person was arrested while an occupant of the vehicle was one of these exceptions. You see, the justification is and was that the person under arrest might break free and obtain a weapon from the vehicle. The search of the passenger compartment was allowed incident to an arrest for the safety of the officers.

The cops could look anywhere in the passenger compartment that was big enough to put some type of weapon. If they found an illegal weapon, they could take it and it could be used as evidence against the bad guy. If in the course of "patting down" the passenger compartment they find evidence of crime, fruit of a crime, or contraband.......THEN they can search the entire vehicle, trunk, engine, inside the tires, headliner, everywhere for other evidence. It's called the automobile exception (to the search warrant requirement)

The legal theory for the exception to the search warrant requirement for vehicles is simply the vehicle has wheels and might leave!...That simple.

This year, however, the supreme court threw a curve. The legal theory allowing officers to search a passenger compartment of a car when an occupant was arrested was so broad that it allowed this search even though the person arrested was in handcuffs, and in the back seat of a patrol car across the street!. This year, the court narrowed up this rule and limited the vehicle pat down to only those occasions where the person was still unrestrained and in the area of the vehicle. So everywhere, officers who want to look through a car for weapons have to come up with safe ways to keep Mr. Badguy around them while they search. Now, if they find some of the above items, like dope, then Mr. Badguy is now going to be arrested for the dope too and since the dope allows a full vehicle search, then it does not matter where the crook is when that search is done.

So, if you get stopped by the police and arrested for some old traffic warrant or something, please don't be one of those who yell at the cops that they can't search your car because they don't have a warrant........they don't need one!