CSDP Blog

A new ruling states that arrests for traffic offenses will not by themselves allow police officers to search vehicles. According to the New York Times April 22, 2009 article, ("Supreme Court Cuts Back Officers Searches of Vehicles") "The Supreme Court on Tuesday significantly cut back the ability of the police to search the cars of people they arrest. Police officers have for a generation understood themselves to be free to search vehicles based on nothing more than the fact that they had just arrested an occupant. That principle, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in his majority opinion, 'has been widely taught in police academies' and 'law enforcement officers have relied on the rule in conducting vehicle searches during the past 28 years."

The article adds, "In a dissent, four justices said the majority had effectively overruled an important and straightforward Fourth Amendment precedent established by the court in a 1981 decision, New York v. Belton. Justice Stevens denied that. The precedent of Belton had often been applied too broadly, he said. Vehicle searches should be allowed only in two situations, he wrote: when the person being arrested is close enough to the car to reach in, possibly to grab a weapon or tamper with evidence; or when the arresting officer reasonably believes that the car contains evidence pertinent to the very crime that prompted the arrest."

The article notes, "Justice Stevens, joined by the unusual alliance of Justices Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the court had agreed to hear the case because the conventional view of the Belton decision had been widely criticized. 'The chorus that has called for us to revisit Belton,' Justice Stevens wrote, 'includes courts, scholars and members of this court who have questioned that decision's clarity and fidelity to Fourth Amendment principles.' Though Justice Stevens did not concede that Tuesday's decision overruled Belton, he did say that fidelity to precedent was no reason to allow constitutional violations to continue.'Countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious that a traffic violation,' he wrote, 'have had their constitutional right to the security of their private effects violated' by the broad rule struck down on Tuesday."