Illinois v. Lafayette

The decision was one of many made by the Burger Court that rolled back the Fourth Amendment protections given to persons by the Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s. Most notably, the ruling reinforced the notion that law enforcement officers who are conducting a search need not resort to the least intrusive means in carrying out the search.

On 1 September 1980, Officer Maurice Mietzner of the Kankakee City Police Department in Kankakee, Illinois, responded to a call about a disturbance at the Town Cinema, a local movie theatre. At the theatre, Mietzner encountered Ralph Lafayette, who was embroiled in a dispute with the theatre manager. Mietzner arrested Lafayette for disturbing the peace and Mietzner took Lafayette away in handcuffs. En route to the station, Lafayette remained in possession of his shoulder bag.

In the booking room at the police station, Mietzner removed the handcuffs from Lafayette's wrists and ordered Lafayette to empty his pockets. Mietzner then searched through the contents of Lafayette's shoulder bag and found ten amphetamine pills. Lafayette was charged with possession of a controlled substance.

Before trial, Lafayette moved the court to exclude the amphetamine evidence, arguing that Mietzner had the opportunity to obtain a warrant for the search of the shoulder bag. It is, in fact, a general rule of law under the Fourth Amendment that police should obtain a warrant from a magistrate before they conduct a search. Mietzner conceded at the pre-trial hearing that the bag could have been placed in a locker for safekeeping until he obtained a warrant from a magistrate, but he also testified that it was standard procedure to conduct an inventory of everything in the possession of an arrested person. After the hearing, the state submitted a brief in which it argued, for the first time, that the search was conducted incident to Lafayette's arrest and that Mietzner merely delayed the search. The trial court decided to exclude the evidence.

The state of Illinois appealed the decision to the Illinois Appellate Court, which affirmed. The appeals court reviewed similar cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court to come to their decision. In South Dakota v. Opperman (1976), the High Court held that an inventory search of an arrestee's locked vehicle, impounded for parking violations, was not unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment since the inventory search was conducted to prevent theft of the articles. Additionally, the search of the arrestee's unlocked glove compartment in Opperman was not unreasonable because vandals would have the same access to the glove compartment as they would to the rest of car's interior. Using the reasoning employed by the High Court in Opperman, the Illinois appeals court ruled that the search of Lafayette's shoulder bag was illegal under the Fourth Amendment. "[T]he postponed warrantless search of [Lafayette's] shoulder bag was neither incident to his lawful arrest," the Illinois court pronounced, "nor a valid inventory of belongings, and thus, violated the Fourth Amendment."

The Illinois Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal by the state of Illinois, so the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously reversed. After recounting the case history and facts, Chief Justice Burger, writing for the Court, framed the issue: whether it is "reasonable for police to search the effects of a person under lawful arrest as part of the routine administrative procedure at a police station house incident to booking and jailing the suspect." Since the justification for such searches is not probable cause, Burger wrote, "the absence of a warrant is immaterial to the reasonableness of the search." Rather than probable cause, an inventory search is justified by the need to protect both the arrestee and the officer. By conducting an inventory searching of an arrestee and the arrestee's belongings prior to jailing the arrestee, an officer ensures that the arrestee has no devices that may cause injury to someone. Also, such a search is necessary to prevent theft by police or false claims of theft by jailed arrestees. "[E]very consideration of orderly police administration benefiting both police and the public," Burger stated, "points toward the appropriateness of [Lafayette's] shoulder bag prior to his incarceration."

According to the Court, prior cases supported the decision to reverse. In Opperman, the Court did not consider whether there existed a less intrusive means of protecting police and an arrestee's property. Using the Illinois court's own words, the Court declared that "the real question is not what `could have been achieved,' but whether the Fourth Amendment requires such steps . . . [I]t is not our function to write a manual on administering routine, neutral procedures of the station house," Burger lectured. "Our role is to assure against violations of the Constitution."

Justices Marshall and Brennan concurred in the judgment. In a short concurring opinion, Marshall wrote that "[a] very different case would be presented if the State had relied solely on the fact of arrest to justify the search of [Lafayette's] shoulder bag." According to Marshall and Brennan, Mietzner would not have been able to search the bag at the theatre. The offense--disturbing the peace--was not a charge that required evidence from the bag, nor was it a charge that could have been thwarted by a destruction of evidence. Furthermore, a search of the bag justified by a concern about the possible presence of weapons in the bag would have been illegal because seizure of the bag itself would have accomplished the goal of depriving Lafayette of any weapons in the bag. Thus, according to the concurring justices, the only reason Mietzner's search was legal was because he waited until he reached the police station to conduct it.