New York v. Belton

The holding in Belton seemed to increase the permissible scope of warrantless police searches that are conducted as part of an arrest. Prior to the decision, officers generally were required to limit such searches to the person and the area immediately surrounding the person. In Belton, the Court confirmed that law enforcement personnel have the right to conduct warrantless searches of enclosed places that may be outside of the arrestee's immediate vicinity.

On 9 April 1978, New York State Trooper Douglas Nicot noticed a speeding automobile on the New York State Thruway. Nicot stopped the car and asked to see the driver's license and registration. Neither the driver nor his companions had a driver's license or registration for the vehicle, and no one was related to the vehicle's owner. Nicot smelled an odor of burnt marijuana emanating from the car, and he spotted an envelope marked "Supergold." Suspecting that there was marijuana in the car, Nicot ordered the occupants out of the car, informed them that they were under arrest, read them their Miranda rights, and ordered them to stand apart from each other around his squad car. Nicot opened the suspicious envelope and discovered marijuana. He then searched a jacket that had been left in the vehicle by one of the occupants, Roger Belton. Nicot unzipped a pocket of the jacket and found cocaine.

Belton subsequently was indicted for criminal possession of cocaine. At trial, Belton asked the trial court to exclude the cocaine evidence, arguing that the search of his jacket was illegal under the Fourth Amendment. According to Belton, Officer Nicot should have obtained a search warrant before searching his jacket. The trial court denied the request, and Belton pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a controlled substance. However, in a special plea, Belton preserved a right to appeal the trial court's decision.

Belton lost his first appeal, but the New York Court of Appeals reversed the decision, holding that because Belton was not in a position to gain access to his jacket, Nicot had no right to search it at that time because he did not have a warrant issued by a magistrate. One of the first principles of search and seizure law is that law enforcement personnel must have a warrant before they conduct a search of a person or place. A warrant is issued by a magistrate only after a police officer has persuaded the magistrate that probable cause exists to believe that the person or place to be searched will turn up evidence of a crime. Sometimes an officer does not need a warrant to conduct a search, but the New York Court of Appeals did not consider this one of those times.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. In a 6-3 decision, the Court held that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search of a car's backseat and closed containers in the backseat when the search is incident to a lawful arrest of the car's occupants. The majority opinion, written by Justice Stewart, began its analysis by quoting a law review article written by Professor Wayne R. LaFave. In "Case-By-Case Adjudication Versus Standardized Procedures: The Robinson Dilemma," LaFave posited that the Fourth Amendment "is primarily intended to regulate the police in their day-to-day activities," and that the amendment did not require a "highly sophisticated set of rules, qualified by all sorts of ifs, ands, and buts and requiring the drawing of subtle nuances and hairline distinctions."

Having advanced the notion that rules on warrantless searches by police officers should be simplified, the Court then declared that Fourth Amendment jurisprudence on warrantless searches also needed to be simplified. Various courts around the United States were in disagreement on what constituted an illegal warrantless search, and this was having a detrimental impact on police and the general public. "When a person cannot know how a court will apply a settled principle to a recurring factual situation," Stewart observed, "that person cannot know the scope of his constitutional protection, nor can a policeman know the scope of his authority." The Court acknowledged that Chimel v. California (1969) had established that a warrantless search contemporaneous to an arrest may not "stray beyond the immediate control of the arrestee," but it also noted that courts around the country could not agree on a definition of "beyond the immediate control of the arrestee."

The Court decided that since Belton was seated in the passenger compartment of the vehicle, the passenger compartment of the vehicle was within Belton's immediate control. Thus, it was not unlawful for Nicot to search the passenger compartment. Furthermore, it was not unlawful for Nicot to search any enclosed containers that he found in the passenger compartment. Citing United States v. Robinson (1973) and Draper v. United States (1959), the High Court reasoned that since the passenger compartment was within Belton's reach, so too were any enclosed containers in the passenger area. Since the closed containers also were within Belton's reach, Nicot was justified in opening and searching them.

The New York Court of Appeals held that the warrantless search of Belton's jacket was illegal because Nicot had gained exclusive control over the jacket by seizing it. Such reasoning was "fallacious," wrote Justice Stewart in a footnote, because under such a theory "no search or seizure incident to a lawful custodial arrest would ever be valid; by seizing an article even on the arrestee's person, an officer may be said to have reduced that article to his `exclusive control.'"

Justices Stevens and Rehnquist concurred in the opinion, while Justices Brennan, White, and Marshall dissented. In a dissenting opinion joined by Marshall, Brennan criticized the ruling for creating a rule "that fails to reflect Chimel's underlying policy justifications." Quoting Chimel, Brennan maintained that the real reason for allowing the warrantless search of the area within the immediate control of an arrestee was to permit police officers to conduct a warrantless search of areas "within which [an arrestee] might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence." Quoting more Supreme Court precedents, Brennan argued that there is a "temporal and a spatial limitation of searches incident to arrest," and that the formality of a warrant may be excused only when the search is conducted at the same time as the arrest and is confined to the immediate vicinity of the arrest. As Belton was already arrested and had been placed by Nicot some distance away from the car when Nicot conducted the warrantless search, the High Court's approval of the search "ignore[d] both precedent and principle."

The Court's decision, according to Brennan, also failed to create a more understandable set of rules for warrantless police searches that are conducted incident to an arrest. "Would a warrantless search incident to arrest be conducted five minutes after the suspect left his car?" Brennan wondered. "Thirty minutes? Three hours? Does it matter whether the suspect is standing in close proximity to the car?" Brennan offered a dozen-odd questions that were raised by the majority's decision and then insisted that Chimel "provides a sound, workable rule for determining the constitutionality of a warrantless search incident to arrest." "Unlike the Court's rule," Brennan chided, "it would be faithful to the Fourth Amendment."

Finally, in his own footnote, Brennan ridiculed the majority's claim that all warrantless police searches would be invalid under the analysis employed by the New York Court of Appeals. The majority had set up a "strawman," or a false danger, with such rhetoric. Quoting Chimel and United States v. Chadwick (1977), Brennan complained that the High Court had chosen to ignore its own case precedent that gave the term "exclusive control" a clear definition: "sufficient control such that there is not significant risk that the arrestee or his confederates might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence."

In a shorter dissenting opinion also joined by Justice Marshall, Justice White called the ruling "an extreme extension of Chimel and one to which I cannot subscribe." The Court had ignored its own Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, said Justice White, and "[t]his calls for more caution than the Court today exhibits."