Chimel v. California (1969)

395 U.S. 752 (1969)

Vote: 6-2
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Stewart, joined by Warren, Douglas, Harlan, Brennan, and Marshall
Concurrence: Harlan
Dissent: White, joined by Black
Not participating: Fortas

MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case raises basic questions concerning the permissible scope under the Fourth Amendment of a search incident to a lawful arrest.

The relevant facts are essentially undisputed. Late in the afternoon of September 13, 1965, three police officers arrived at the Santa Ana, California, home of the petitioner with a warrant authorizing his arrest for the burglary of a coin shop. The officers knocked on the door, identified themselves to the petitioner’s wife, and asked if they might come inside. She ushered them into the house, where they waited 10 or 15 minutes until the petitioner returned home from work. When the petitioner entered the house, one of the officers handed him the arrest warrant and asked for permission to “look around.” The petitioner objected, but was advised that, “on the basis of the lawful arrest,” the officers would nonetheless conduct a search. No search warrant had been issued.

Accompanied by the petitioner’s wife, the officers then looked through the entire three-bedroom house. … [T]he officers directed the petitioner’s wife to open drawers and “to physically move contents of the drawers from side to side so that [they] might view any items that would have come from [the] burglary.”

After completing the search, they seized numerous items. … The entire search took between 45 minutes and an hour. At the petitioner’s subsequent state trial on two charges of burglary, the items taken from his house were admitted into evidence against him over his objection that they had been unconstitutionally seized. He was convicted, and the judgments of conviction were affirmed by both the California Court of Appeals … and the California Supreme Court. … Both courts accepted the petitioner’s contention that the arrest warrant was invalid because the supporting affidavit was set out in conclusory terms, but held that, since the arresting officers had procured the warrant “in good faith,” … that arrest had been lawful. From this conclusion, the appellate courts went on to hold that the search … had been incident to a valid arrest. We granted certiorari in order to consider … whether the warrantless search of the petitioner’s entire house can be constitutionally justified as incident to that arrest. …

Approval of a warrantless search incident to a lawful arrest seems first to have been articulated by … Weeks v. United States … but was limited to a right to search the “person.” Eleven years later, the case of Carroll v. United States, brought the following embellishment of the Weeks statement: “When a man is legally arrested for an offense, whatever is found upon his person or in his control which it is unlawful for him to have and which may be used to prove the offense may be seized and held as evidence in the prosecution.”

… [T]he principle emerged in expanded form a few months later in Agnello v. United States … : “The right without a search warrant contemporaneously to search persons lawfully arrested while committing crime and to search the place where the arrest is made … is not to be doubted. … ”

And in Marron v. United States, two years later … [t]he Court upheld the seizure of [a] ledger by holding that, since the agents had made a lawful arrest, “[t]hey had a right without a warrant contemporaneously to search the place in order to find and seize the things used to carry on the criminal enterprise.”

That the Marron opinion did not mean all that it seemed to say became evident, however, a few years later … in Lefkowitz, a case in which the Court held unlawful a search of desk drawers and a cabinet despite the fact that the search had accompanied a lawful arrest.

… [I]n Harris v. United States … officers had obtained a warrant for Harris’ arrest on the basis of … a forged check. He was arrested in the living room of his four-room apartment … the officers undertook a thorough search of the entire apartment. Inside a desk drawer, they found a sealed envelope marked … which was … found to contain altered Selective Service documents, and those documents were used to secure Harris’ conviction. … The Court rejected Harris’ Fourth Amendment claim, sustaining the search as “incident to arrest.”

Only a year after Harris, however, the pendulum swung again. In Trupiano v. United States, agents raided the site of an illicit distillery, saw one of several conspirators operating the still, and arrested him, contemporaneously “seiz[ing] the illicit distillery.” The Court held that the arrest and others made subsequently had been valid, but that the unexplained failure of the agents to procure a search warrant — in spite of the fact that they had had more than enough time before the raid to do so — rendered the search unlawful. …

In 1950, two years after Trupiano, came United States v. Rabinowitz, the decision upon which California primarily relies in the case now before us. … The test, said the Court, “is not whether it is reasonable to procure a search warrant, but whether the search was reasonable.”

Rabinowitz has come to stand for the proposition that a warrantless search “incident to a lawful arrest” may generally extend to the area that is considered to be in the “possession” or under the “control” of the person arrested. And it was on the basis of that proposition that the California courts upheld the search of the petitioner’s entire house in this case. That doctrine, however, at least in the broad sense in which it was applied by the California courts in this case, can withstand neither historical nor rational analysis.

Nor is the rationale by which the State seeks here to sustain the search of the petitioner’s house supported by a reasoned view of the background and purpose of the Fourth Amendment. … The Amendment was in large part a reaction to the general warrants and warrantless searches that had so alienated the colonists and had helped speed the movement for independence … the requirement that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,” plays a crucial part. …

Clearly, the general requirement that a search warrant be obtained is not lightly to be dispensed with, and “the burden is on those seeking [an] exemption [from the requirement] to show the need for it. … ” United States v. Jeffers.

Only last Term, in Terry v. Ohio, we emphasized that “the police must, whenever practicable, obtain advance judicial approval of searches and seizures through the warrant procedure,” and that “[t]he scope of [a] search must be strictly tied to and justified by the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible. … ”

A similar analysis underlies the “search incident to arrest” principle, and marks its proper extent. When an arrest is made, it is reasonable for the arresting officer to search the person arrested in order to remove any weapons that the latter might seek to use in order to resist arrest or effect his escape. Otherwise, the officer’s safety might well be endangered, and the arrest itself frustrated. In addition, it is entirely reasonable for the arresting officer to search for and seize any evidence on the arrestee’s person in order to prevent its concealment or destruction. And the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary items must, of course, be governed by a like rule. … There is ample justification, therefore, for a search of the arrestee’s person and the area “within his immediate control” — construing that phrase to mean the area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence.

There is no comparable justification, however, for routinely searching any room other than that in which an arrest occurs — or, for that matter, for searching through all the desk drawers or other closed or concealed areas in that room itself. Such searches, in the absence of well recognized exceptions, may be made only under the authority of a search warrant. The “adherence to judicial processes” mandated by the Fourth Amendment requires no less. …

It is argued in the present case that it is “reasonable” to search a man’s house when he is arrested in it. But that argument is founded on little more than a subjective view regarding the acceptability of certain sorts of police conduct, and not on considerations relevant to Fourth Amendment interests. Under such an unconfined analysis, Fourth Amendment protection in this area would approach the evaporation point. It is not easy to explain why, for instance, it is less subjectively “reasonable” to search a man’s house when he is arrested on his front lawn — or just down the street — than it is when he happens to be in the house at the time of arrest. As Mr. Justice Frankfurter put it: “To say that the search must be reasonable is to require some criterion of reason. … The test is the reason underlying and expressed by the Fourth Amendment: the history and the experience which it embodies and the safeguards afforded. … ” United States v. Rabinowitz (dissenting opinion).

Thus, although “[t]he recurring questions of the reasonableness of searches” depend upon “the facts and circumstances … of the case,” (opinion of the Court), those facts and circumstances must be viewed in the light of established Fourth Amendment principles. … The petitioner correctly points out that one result of decisions such as Rabinowitz and Harris is to give law enforcement officials the opportunity to engage in searches not justified by probable cause, by the simple expedient of arranging to arrest suspects at home, rather than elsewhere. … [H]ad he been arrested earlier in the day, at his place of employment, rather than at home, no search of his house could have been made without a search warrant. …

Rabinowitz and Harris have been the subject of critical commentary for many years, and have been relied upon less and less in our own decisions. It is time, for the reasons we have stated, to hold that … they are no longer to be followed.

Application of sound Fourth Amendment principles to the facts of this case produces a clear result. The search here went far beyond the petitioner’s person and the area from within which he might have obtained either a weapon or something that could have been used as evidence against him. There was no constitutional justification, in the absence of a search warrant, for extending the search beyond that area. The scope of the search was, therefore, “unreasonable” under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, and the petitioner’s conviction cannot stand.

Reversed.

MR. JUSTICE HARLAN, concurring.

I join the Court’s opinion with these remarks concerning a factor to which the Court has not alluded.

The only thing that has given me pause in voting to overrule Harris and Rabinowitz is that as a result of Mapp v. Ohio (1961), and Ker v. California (1963), every change in Fourth Amendment law must now be obeyed by state officials facing widely different problems of local law enforcement. We simply do not know the extent to which cities and towns across the Nation are prepared to administer the greatly expanded warrant system which will be required by today’s decision; nor can we say with assurance that, in each and every local situation, the warrant requirement plays an essential role in the protection of those fundamental liberties protected against state infringement by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thus, one is now faced with the dilemma, envisioned in my separate opinion in Ker … of choosing between vindicating sound Fourth Amendment principles at the possible expense of state concerns, long recognized to be consonant with the Fourteenth Amendment before Mapp and Ker came on the books, or diluting the Federal Bill of Rights in the interest of leaving the States at least some elbow room in their methods of criminal law enforcement. No comparable dilemma exists, of course, with respect to the impact of today’s decision within the federal system itself.

This federal-state factor has not been an easy one for me to resolve, but in the last analysis, I cannot in good conscience vote to perpetuate bad Fourth Amendment law.

I add only that this case, together with Benton v. Maryland, post,  North Carolina v. Pearce, ante,  and Simpson v. Rice, ante, all decided today, serve to point up, as few other cases have, the profound changes that the “incorporation doctrine” has wrought both in the workings of our federal system and upon the adjudicative processes of this Court.

MR. JUSTICE WHITE, with whom MR. JUSTICE BLACK joins, dissenting.

. … The rule which has prevailed, but for very brief or doubtful periods of aberration, is that a search incident to an arrest may extend to those areas under the control of the defendant and where items subject to constitutional seizure may be found. The justification for this rule must, under the language of the Fourth Amendment, lie in the reasonableness of the rule. …

In terms, then, the Court must decide whether a given search is reasonable … it seems to me unreasonable to require the police to leave the scene in order to obtain a search warrant when they are already legally there to make a valid arrest, and when there must almost always be a strong possibility that confederates of the arrested man will in the meanwhile remove the items for which the police have probable cause to search. …

This case provides a good illustration of my point that it is unreasonable to require police to leave the scene of an arrest in order to obtain a search warrant when they already have probable cause to search and there is a clear danger that the items for which they may reasonably search will be removed before they return with a warrant. Petitioner was arrested in his home after an arrest. … There was doubtless probable cause not only to arrest petitioner, but also to search his house. He had obliquely admitted, both to a neighbor and to the owner of the burglarized store, that he had committed the burglary … there was surely probable cause on which a warrant could have issued to search the house for the stolen coins. Moreover, had the police simply arrested petitioner, taken him off to the station house, and later returned with a warrant, it seems very likely that petitioner’s wife, who, in view of petitioner’s generally garrulous nature, must have known of the robbery, would have removed the coins. For the police to search the house while the evidence they had probable cause to search out and seize was still there cannot be considered unreasonable.

This line of analysis, supported by the precedents of this Court, hinges on two assumptions. One is that the arrest of petitioner without a valid warrant was constitutional as the majority assumes; the other is that the police were not required to obtain a search warrant in advance, even though they knew that the effect of the arrest might well be to alert petitioner’s wife that the coins had better be removed soon. …

I would follow past cases and permit such a search to be carried out without a warrant, since the fact of arrest supplies an exigent circumstance justifying police action before the evidence can be removed. …

It is agreed that such a warrant would be required absent exigent circumstances. I would hold that the fact of arrest supplies such an exigent circumstance. …

… I would uphold the constitutionality of this search contemporaneous with an arrest, since there were probable cause both for the search and for the arrest, exigent circumstances involving the removal or destruction of evidence, and satisfactory opportunity to dispute the issues of probable cause shortly thereafter. In this case, the search was reasonable.

Excerpted by Alex Nobiletti and Sobhi Sidani

Maryland v. Buie (1990)

494 U.S. 325 (1990)

Vote: 7-2
Decision: Vacated and remand
Majority: White, joined by Rehnquist, Blackmun, Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia, and Kennedy
Concurrence: Stevens
Concurrence: Kennedy
Dissent: Brennen, joined by Marshall

Justice WHITE delivered the opinion of the Court.

A “protective sweep” is a quick and limited search of a premises, incident to an arrest and conducted to protect the safety of police officers or others. It is narrowly confined to a cursory visual inspection of those places in which a person might be hiding. In this case we must decide what level of justification is required by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments before police officers, while effecting the arrest of a suspect in his home pursuant to an arrest warrant, may conduct a warrantless protective sweep of all or part of the premises. The Court of Appeals of Maryland held that a running suit seized in plain view during such a protective sweep should have been suppressed at respondent’s armed robbery trial because the officer who conducted the sweep did not have probable cause to believe that a serious and demonstrable potentiality for danger existed. We conclude that the Fourth Amendment would permit the protective sweep undertaken here if the searching officer “possesse[d] a reasonable belief based on ‘specific and articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant[ed]’ the officer in believing,” Michigan v. Long, (1983) (quoting Terry v. Ohio, (1968)), that the area swept harbored an individual posing a danger to the officer or others. We accordingly vacate the judgment below and remand for application of this standard.

On February 3, 1986, two men committed an armed robbery of a Godfather’s Pizza restaurant in Prince George’s County, Maryland. One of the robbers was wearing a red running suit. That same day, Prince George’s County police obtained arrest warrants for respondent Jerome Edward Buie and his suspected accomplice in the robbery, Lloyd Allen. …

On February 5, the police executed the arrest warrant for Buie. … Six or seven officers proceeded to Buie’s house. Once inside, the officers fanned out through the first and second floors. Corporal James Rozar announced that he would “freeze” the basement so that no one could come up and surprise the officers. With his service revolver drawn, Rozar twice shouted into the basement, ordering anyone down there to come out. When a voice asked who was calling, Rozar announced three times: “this is the police, show me your hands.” Eventually, a pair of hands appeared around the bottom of the stairwell and Buie emerged from the basement. He was arrested, searched, and handcuffed by Rozar. Thereafter, Detective Joseph Frolich entered the basement “in case there was someone else” down there. He noticed a red running suit lying in plain view on a stack of clothing and seized it.

The trial court denied Buie’s motion to suppress the running suit. … The State introduced the running suit into evidence at Buie’s trial. A jury convicted Buie of robbery with a deadly weapon and using a handgun in the commission of a felony.

The Court of Special Appeals of Maryland affirmed the trial court’s denial of the suppression motion. The court stated that Detective Frolich did not go into the basement to search for evidence, but to look for the suspected accomplice or anyone else who might pose a threat to the officers on the scene. …

” … [I]f there is reason to believe that the arrestee had accomplices who are still at large, something less than probable cause — reasonable suspicion — should be sufficient to justify a limited additional intrusion to investigate the possibility of their presence.”

The Court of Appeals of Maryland reversed … The court acknowledged that … when the sanctity of the home is involved, the exceptions to the warrant requirement are few, and held: “[T]o justify a protective sweep of a home, the government must show that there is probable cause to believe that “a serious and demonstrable potentiality for danger”‘ exists.” The court went on to find that the State had not satisfied that probable-cause requirement.

. … The issue in this case is what level of justification the Fourth Amendment required before Detective Frolich could legally enter the basement to see if someone else was there.

Petitioner, the State of Maryland, argues that, under a general reasonableness balancing test, police should be permitted to conduct a protective sweep whenever they make an in-home arrest for a violent crime. … [T]he State contends that protective sweeps fall within the ambit of the doctrine announced in Terry v. Ohio, (1968), and that such sweeps may be conducted in conjunction with a valid in-home arrest whenever the police reasonably suspect a risk of danger. … The United States, as amicus curiae, supporting the State, also argues for a Terry-type standard of reasonable, articulable suspicion of risk to the officer, and contends that that standard is met here. …

According to Buie … there is no justification for relaxing the probable-cause standard. If something less than probable cause is sufficient, respondent argues that it is no less than individualized suspicion — specific, articulable facts supporting a reasonable belief that there are persons on the premises who are a threat to the officers. According to Buie, there were no such specific, articulable facts to justify the search of his basement.

It goes without saying that the Fourth Amendment bars only unreasonable searches and seizures. … Our cases show that in determining reasonableness, we have balanced the intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests against its promotion of legitimate governmental interests. … Under this test, a search of the house or office is generally not reasonable without a warrant issued on probable cause. There are other contexts, however, where the public interest is such that neither a warrant nor probable cause is required. …

The Terry case is most instructive for present purposes. There we held that an on-the-street “frisk” for weapons must be tested by the Fourth Amendment’s general proscription against unreasonable searches because such a frisk involves “. … swift action predicated upon the on-the-spot observations … and as a practical matter could not be, subjected to the warrant procedure.”

We stated that there is “no ready test for determining reasonableness other than by balancing the need to search … against the invasion which the search … entails.'” (quoting Camara v. Municipal Court, (1967)). …

We therefore authorized a limited patdown for weapons where a reasonably prudent officer would be warranted in the belief, based on “specific and articulable facts,” and not on a mere “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or hunch,'” “that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual.”

In Michigan v. Long … [t]he … Court expressly rejected the contention that Terry restricted preventative searches to the person of a detained suspect. … In a sense, Long authorized a “frisk” of an automobile for weapons.

The ingredients to apply the balance struck in Terry and Long are present in this case. …

That Buie had an expectation of privacy … does not mean such rooms were immune from entry. In Terry and Long we were concerned with the immediate interest of the police officers in taking steps to assure themselves that the persons with whom they were dealing were not armed with or able to gain immediate control of a weapon that could unexpectedly and fatally be used against them. In the instant case, there is an analogous interest of the officers in taking steps to assure themselves that the house in which a suspect is being or has just been arrested is not harboring other persons who are dangerous and who could unexpectedly launch an attack. The risk of danger in the context of an arrest in the home is as great as, if not greater than, it is in an on-the-street or roadside investigatory encounter. … A protective sweep … occurs as an adjunct to the serious step of taking a person into custody for the purpose of prosecuting him for a crime. Moreover, unlike an encounter on the street or along a highway, an in-home arrest puts the officer at the disadvantage of being on his adversary’s “turf.” An ambush in a confined setting of unknown configuration is more to be feared than it is in open, more familiar surroundings.

… [We] are quite sure … that the arresting officers are permitted in such circumstances to take reasonable steps to ensure their safety after, and while making, the arrest. That interest is sufficient to outweigh the intrusion such procedures may entail.

We agree with the State, as did the court below, that a warrant was not required. We also hold that as an incident to the arrest the officers could, as a precautionary matter and without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, look in closets and other spaces immediately adjoining the place of arrest from which an attack could be immediately launched. Beyond that, however, we hold that there must be articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, would warrant a reasonably prudent officer in believing that the area to be swept harbors an individual posing a danger to those on the arrest scene. This is no more and no less than was required in Terry and Long, and as in those cases, we think this balance is the proper one.

. …

Affirmance is not required by Chimel v. California, (1969), where it was held that in the absence of a search warrant, the justifiable search incident to an in-home arrest could not extend beyond the arrestee’s person and the area from within which the arrestee might have obtained a weapon. First, Chimel was concerned with a full-blown search of the entire house for evidence of the crime for which the arrest was made, not the more limited intrusion contemplated by a protective sweep. Second, the justification for the search incident to arrest considered in Chimel was the threat posed by the arrestee, not the safety threat posed by … by unseen third parties in the house. …

The type of search we authorize today is far removed from the “top-to-bottom” search involved in Chimel; moreover, it is decidedly not “automati[c],” but may be conducted only when justified by a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the house is harboring a person posing a danger to those on the arrest scene.

We conclude that, by requiring a protective sweep to be justified by probable cause to believe that a serious and demonstrable potentiality for danger existed, the Court of Appeals of Maryland applied an unnecessarily strict Fourth Amendment standard. The Fourth Amendment permits a properly limited protective sweep in conjunction with an in-home arrest when the searching officer possesses a reasonable belief based on specific and articulable facts that the area to be swept harbors an individual posing a danger to those on the arrest scene. We therefore vacate the judgment below and remand this case to the Court of Appeals of Maryland for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Justice BRENNAN, with whom Justice MARSHALL joins, dissenting.

Today the Court for the first time extends Terry v. Ohio, into the home, dispensing with the Fourth Amendment’s general requirements of a warrant and probable cause and carving a “reasonable suspicion” exception for protective sweeps in private dwellings. …

. …

The Court today holds that Terry’s “reasonable suspicion” standard “strikes the proper balance between officer safety and citizen privacy” for protective sweeps in private dwellings. I agree with the majority that officers executing an arrest warrant within a private dwelling have an interest in protecting themselves against potential ambush by third parties, but the majority offers no support for its assumption that the danger of ambush during planned home arrests approaches the danger of unavoidable “on-the-beat” confrontations in “the myriad daily situations in which policemen and citizens confront each other on the street.” Terry, supra. In any event, the Court’s implicit judgment that a protective sweep constitutes a “minimally intrusive” search akin to that involved in Terry markedly undervalues the nature and scope of the privacy interests involved.

While the Fourth Amendment protects a person’s privacy interests in a variety of settings, “physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.” United States v. United States District Court, (1972). The Court discounts the nature of the intrusion because it believes that the scope of the intrusion is limited. The Court explains that a protective sweep’s scope is “narrowly confined to a cursory visual inspection of those places in which a person might be hiding,” and confined in duration to a period “no longer than is necessary to dispel the reasonable suspicion of danger and in any event no longer than it takes to complete the arrest and depart the premises.” But these spatial and temporal restrictions are not particularly limiting. … Police officers searching for potential ambushers might enter every room including basements and attics; open up closets, lockers, chests, wardrobes, and cars; and peer under beds and behind furniture. The officers will view letters, documents and personal effects that are on tables or desks or are visible inside open drawers; books, records, tapes, and pictures on shelves; and clothing, medicines, toiletries and other paraphernalia not carefully stored in dresser drawers or bathroom cupboards. While perhaps not a “full-blown” or “top-to-bottom” search, a protective sweep is much closer to it than to a “limited patdown for weapons” or a ” frisk’ of an automobile.”. …

In light of the special sanctity of a private residence and the highly intrusive nature of a protective sweep, I firmly believe that police officers must have probable cause to fear that their personal safety is threatened by a hidden confederate of an arrestee before they may sweep through the entire home. Given the state court determination that the officers searching Buie’s home lacked probable cause to perceive such a danger and therefore were not lawfully present in the basement, I would affirm the state court’s decision to suppress the incriminating evidence. I respectfully dissent.

Excerpted by Alex Nobiletti

Knowles v. Iowa (1998)

525 U.S. 113 (1998)

Vote: 9-0
Decision: Reversed and remanded
Majority: Rehnquist, joined by Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer

CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court.

An Iowa police officer stopped petitioner Knowles for speeding, but issued him a citation rather than arresting him. The question presented is whether such a procedure authorizes the officer, consistently with the Fourth Amendment, to conduct a full search of the car. We answer this question “no.”

Knowles was stopped in Newton, Iowa, after having been clocked driving 43 miles per hour on a road where the speed limit was 25 miles per hour. The police officer issued a citation to Knowles, although under Iowa law he might have arrested him. The officer then conducted a full search of the car, and under the driver’s seat he found a bag of marijuana and a “pot pipe.” Knowles was then arrested and charged with violation of state laws dealing with controlled substances.

Before trial, Knowles moved to suppress the evidence so obtained. He argued that the search could not be sustained under the “search incident to arrest” exception recognized in United States v. Robinson (1973) because he had not been placed under arrest. At the hearing on the motion to suppress, the police officer conceded that he had neither Knowles’ consent nor probable cause to conduct the search. He relied on Iowa law dealing with such searches.

Iowa Code Ann. § 321.485(1)(a) provides that Iowa peace officers having cause to believe that a person has violated any traffic or motor vehicle equipment law may arrest the person and immediately take the person before a magistrate. Iowa law also authorizes the far more usual practice of issuing a citation in lieu of arrest or in lieu of continued custody after an initial arrest.1 See Iowa Code Ann. § 805.1(1). Section 805.1(4) provides that the issuance of a citation in lieu of an arrest “does not affect the officer’s authority to conduct an otherwise lawful search.” The Iowa Supreme Court has interpreted this provision as providing authority to officers to conduct a full-blown search of an automobile and driver in those cases where police elect not to make a custodial arrest and instead issue a citation-that is, a search incident to citation. …

Based on this authority, the trial court denied the motion to suppress and found Knowles guilty. The Supreme Court of Iowa … affirmed by a divided vote. Relying on its earlier opinion in State v. Doran, (1997), the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the search under a bright-line “search incident to citation” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, reasoning that so long as the arresting officer had probable cause to make a custodial arrest, there need not in fact have been a custodial arrest. We granted certiorari, and we now reverse.

. … The question we … address is whether the search at issue, authorized as it was by state law, nonetheless violates the Fourth Amendment.

In Robinson, supra, we noted the two historical rationales for the “search incident to arrest” exception: (1) the need to disarm the suspect in order to take him into custody, and (2) the need to preserve evidence for later use at trial. … But neither of these underlying rationales for the search incident to arrest exception is sufficient to justify the search in the present case.

We have recognized that the first rationale-officer safety-is “‘both legitimate and weighty,'” Maryland v. Wilson, (1997) (quoting Pennsylvania v. Mimms, (1977)). The threat to officer safety from issuing a traffic citation, however, is a good deal less than in the case of a custodial arrest. In Robinson, we stated that a custodial arrest involves “danger to an officer” because of “the extended exposure which follows the taking of a suspect into custody and transporting him to the police station.” We recognized that “[t]he danger to the police officer flows from the fact of the arrest, and its attendant proximity, stress, and uncertainty, and not from the grounds for arrest.” A routine traffic stop, on the other hand, is a relatively brief encounter and “is more analogous to a so-called ‘Terry stop’ … than to a formal arrest.” Berkemer v. McCarty, (1984). …

This is not to say that the concern for officer safety is absent in the case of a routine traffic stop. It plainly is not. … But while the concern for officer safety in this context may justify the “minimal” additional intrusion of ordering a driver and passengers out of the car, it does not by itself justify the often considerably greater intrusion attending a full field-type search. Even without the search authority Iowa urges, officers have other, independent bases to search for weapons and protect themselves from danger. For example, they may order out of a vehicle both the driver, Mimms, and any passengers, Wilson,; perform a “patdown” of a driver and any passengers upon reasonable suspicion that they may be armed and dangerous, Terry v. Ohio, (1968); conduct a “Terry pat down” of the passenger compartment of a vehicle upon reasonable suspicion that an occupant is dangerous and may gain immediate control of a weapon, Michigan v. Long, (1983); and even conduct a full search of the passenger compartment, including any containers therein, pursuant to a custodial arrest, New York v. Belton, (1981).

Nor has Iowa shown the second justification for the authority to search incident to arrest-the need to discover and preserve evidence. Once Knowles was stopped for speeding and issued a citation, all the evidence necessary to prosecute that offense had been obtained. No further evidence of excessive speed was going to be found either on the person of the offender or in the passenger compartment of the car.

Iowa nevertheless argues that a “search incident to citation” is justified because a suspect who is subject to a routine traffic stop may attempt to hide or destroy evidence related to his identity (e.g., a driver’s license or vehicle registration), or destroy evidence of another, as yet undetected crime. As for the destruction of evidence relating to identity, if a police officer is not satisfied with the identification furnished by the driver, this may be a basis for arresting him rather than merely issuing a citation. As for destroying evidence of other crimes, the possibility that an officer would stumble onto evidence wholly unrelated to the speeding offense seems remote.

In Robinson, we held that the authority to conduct a full field search as incident to an arrest was a “bright-line rule,” which was based on the concern for officer safety and destruction or loss of evidence, but which did not depend in every case upon the existence of either concern. Here we are asked to extend that “bright-line rule” to a situation where the concern for officer safety is not present to the same extent and the concern for destruction or loss of evidence is not present at all. We decline to do so. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Iowa is reversed, and the cause is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Excerpted by Alex Nobiletti