United States v. Robinson

Petitioner
United States
Respondent
Willie Robinson
Petitioner's Claim
That a conviction for a drug offense should not have been overturned on the ground that the search during which the drugs were discovered violated the suspect's Fourth Amendment rights.
Chief Lawyer for Petitioner
Allan A. Tuttle
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
Joseph V. Gartlan, Jr.
Justices for the Court
Harry A. Blackmun, Warren E. Burger, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., William H. Rehnquist (writing for the Court), Potter Stewart, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
William J. Brennan, Jr., William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
11 December 1973
Decision
Reversed the court of appeals decision and held that a search incident to a lawful arrest is not limited to a frisk of the outer clothing for the removalof weapons.
Significance
In United States v. Robinson the Court reaffirmed its views that a suspect under valid arrest may be subjected to a full search of his person, without a search warrant, and that a search incident to arrest is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The Court also reaffirmed that evidence found duringsuch a search should not be excluded from court.
On 23 April 1968, Officer Richard Jenks of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department saw Willie Robinson driving a 1965 Cadillac. Because ofa previous investigation four days earlier, Jenks believed that Robinson wasdriving a car after his driver's license had been revoked. Jenks pulled Robinson over and all three occupants got out of the car. Jenks arrested Robinsonfor "operating after revocation and obtaining a permit by misrepresentation." Jenks searched Robinson in accordance with police department rules. Duringthe patdown, Jenks felt something in the left breast pocket of Robinson's coat but could not tell what it was. He then reached into the pocket and pulledout a crumpled cigarette package. Jenks felt objects in the package, but didnot know what they were. Upon opening the package, Jenks found 14 gelatin capsules of white powder, which turned out to be heroin. This heroin was used asevidence in a district court trial, in which Robinson was convicted of a drug offense.
The court of appeals reversed this conviction on the ground that the heroin had been found during a search that violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a search warrant. The Supreme Court ruled that even after a police officer lawfully places a suspectunder arrest for the purpose of taking him into custody, he may not ordinarily proceed to fully search the prisoner. Instead, he must make a limited friskof the outer clothing and remove any weapons found. This decision was basedon Terry v. Ohio (1968), a decision that frisking for weapons is a reasonable search even without a warrant or probable cause.
In the instant case, because this was a traffic stop, no further evidence ofthe crime could be obtained in a search of the arrestee. Thus, only a searchfor weapons could be justified. The court of appeals also felt that case-by-case adjudication was necessary to decide if a search of a person incident toa lawful arrest is justified.
A Traditional Exception To The Warrant Requirement
Justice Rehnquist, in his opinion for the majority, noted that a search incident to a lawful arrest is a traditional exception to the warrant requirementof the Fourth Amendment. This is based on two propositions. The first is thata search of a person may be made during a lawful arrest. The second is thata search may be made of the area within the control of the arrestee. The authority to search incident to a valid arrest has been repeatedly affirmed in decisions by the Court since Weeks v. United States was decided in 1914.These cases do not simply speak in terms of an exception to the warrant requirement, but in terms of an affirmative authority to search. Thus, they clearly imply that such searches also meet the Fourth Amendment's requirement of reasonableness.
Justice Rehnquist noted that early authorities are sketchy on the issue of search incident to arrest, but they tend to support the broad statement of theauthority to search incident to arrest found in later Court decisions, ratherthan the restrictive one used by the court of appeals in this case. The reason for this authority rests both on the need to disarm a suspect and on the need to preserve evidence on his person. The police should not assume that a person arrested for driving with a revoked license is less likely to have dangerous weapons than a person arrested for some other crime. In taking a suspect into custody and transporting him to the police station, the officer is exposed to a certain amount of danger. This justifies treating all custodial arrests alike for the purposes of searching a suspect.
Justice Rehnquist's main argument with the court of appeals decision was thatcase-by-case adjudication was not necessary. "A police officer's determination as to how and where to search the person of a suspect whom he has arrestedis necessarily a quick ad hoc judgment which the Fourth Amendment does not require to be broken down in each instance into an analysis of each step in the search." The authority to search does not depend on what a court might later decide was the likelihood that weapons or evidence might have been found onthe suspect. Since a custodial arrest based on probable cause is a reasonable, lawful intrusion under the Fourth Amendment, a search incident to the arrest needs no further justification. The fact of the lawful arrest establishesthe authority to search. In the case of a lawful custodial arrest a full search of the person is an exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment and is also a reasonable search under that amendment.
Justice Rehnquist summed up his remarks by noting that the search conducted by Officer Jenks was permissible under the Fourth Amendment. Although thorough, the search was not extreme or abusive. Since custodial arrest gives the authority to search, the fact that Jenks was not afraid of Robinson and did notsuspect that he was armed makes no difference to his authority to search. Because Jenks found the crumpled cigarette package during the course of a lawfulsearch, he was entitled to search it. When he found the heroin, he was entitled to seize it as "fruits, instrumentalities, or contraband" that furnishedevidence of a crime.
Justice Powell, in a concurrence, stated, "I believe that an individual lawfully subjected to a custodial arrest retains no significant Fourth Amendment interest in the privacy of his person." Custodial arrest is a significant intrusion of state power into the privacy of one's person. During a lawful arrestone's privacy interest is subordinated to a legitimate and overriding governmental concern.
A Long Tradition Of Case-By-Case Adjudication
Justice Marshall wrote the dissent. He noted that the majority's decision represented a clear and marked departure from the long tradition of case-by-caseadjudication of the reasonableness of searches and seizures under the FourthAmendment. Justice Marshall believed that the Fourth Amendment has meaning only when the conduct of law enforcement can be subjected to the detached, neutral scrutiny of a judge who evaluates the reasonableness of a particular search or seizure, taking into account the particular circumstances. The function of the Fourth Amendment is to ensure that the "quick ad hoc" judgments of police officers are subject to review and control by the judiciary. There aresome situations that require exceptions to the warrant requirement, such as moving vehicles, but those exceptions do not justify precluding further judicial inquiry into the reasonableness of that search. "It is the role of the judiciary, not of police officers, to delimit the scope of exceptions to the warrant requirement."
Justice Marshall noted that several states and federal courts have held that,absent special circumstances, a police officer has no right to conduct a full search of the person incident to a lawful arrest for violation of a motor vehicle regulation. Marshall felt that the majority's attempt to avoid case-by-case adjudication of Fourth Amendment issues "is not only misguided as a matter of principle, but is also doomed to fail as a matter of practical application." The possibility always exists of a police officer using a traffic stopas a pretext to conduct a search in the absence of probable cause. Case-by-case adjudication will always be necessary to determine whether a full arrestwas made for legitimate reasons or as a pretext for a search.
An individual's interest in remaining free from unnecessarily intrusive invasions of privacy and society's interest that police officers not take unnecessary risks in the performance of their duties are competing interests that deserve the Court's most serious attention. Justice Marshall was not convinced that it is reasonable for police officers to conduct more than a Terry-type frisk for weapons when seeking to disarm a traffic offender who is taken into custody. He saw no justification consistent with the Fourth Amendment that authorized Jenks to open the package he found in Robinson's pocket and to look inside. Opening the package served no purpose because even if it had containeda small weapon, Robinson could not have gotten a hold of it once Jenks tookit. "The mere fact of an arrest should be no justification, in and of itself,for invading the privacy of the individual's personal effects."
Justice Marshall felt that the only reasoned distinction that should be madein cases like this is between warrantless searches which serve legitimate protective and evidentiary functions and those that do not. Jenks's search wentbeyond what was reasonably necessary to protect him from harm or to ensure Robinson would not escape. This search fell outside the scope of a properly drawn "search incident to arrest" exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.
Impact
The Supreme Court's ruling in Whren v. United States (1996), which gave police broad power to use even minor traffic violations as justification for pulling over motorists and searching their cars for drugs cited United States v. Robinson as a precedent. Under Whren's unanimous ruling, once acar is stopped because of a traffic violation, police may ask the driver questions and visually search the passenger compartment. If officers suspect a weapon is in the car, they can physically search the entire car. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in that opinion:

We flatly dismissed the idea thatan ulterior motive might serve to strip the agents of their legal justification. In United States v. Robinson . . . we held that a traffic-violation arrest (of the sort here) would not be rendered invalid by the fact that itwas "a mere pretext for a narcotics search," and that a lawful post-arrest search of the person would not be rendered invalid by the fact that it was notmotivated by the officer-safety concern that justifies such searches.

Scalia quoted from the Robinson case: "Since it is the fact of custodial arrest which gives rise to the authority to search, it is of no moment that [the officer] did not indicate any subjective fear of the [arrestee] or that he did not himself suspect that [the arrestee] was armed."
Related Cases

• Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914).
  
• Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 1320 (1925).
  
• Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).
  
• Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969).
  
• Scott v. United States, 436 U.S. 128 (1978).
  
• Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996).