Source: https://libertyworksradionetwork.com/jml/index.php/opinions/dick-greb/136-in-their-own-words-oppression-on-the-installment-plan
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 12:01:55+00:00

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Concerned for his safety, Nichols asked petitioner if he had any narcotics or weapons on him or in his vehicle. Petitioner said no. Nichols then asked petitioner if he could pat him down, to which petitioner agreed. Nichols felt a bulge in petitioner’s left front pocket and again asked him if he had any illegal narcotics on him. This time petitioner stated that he did, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out two individual bags, one containing three bags of marijuana and the other containing a large amount of crack cocaine. Nichols handcuffed petitioner, informed him that he was under arrest, and placed him in the back seat of the patrol car. He then searched petitioner’s vehicle and found a BryCo. 9-millimeter handgun under the driver’s seat. A grand jury charged petitioner with possession with intent to distribute cocaine base, 84 Stat. 1260, 21 U.S.C. §841(a)(1), possession of a firearm after having been previously convicted of a crime punishable by a term of imprisonment exceeding one year, 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(1), and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, §924(c)(1). Petitioner sought to suppress, inter alia, the firearm as the fruit of an unconstitutional search. After a hearing, the District Court denied petitioner’s motion to suppress, holding that the automobile search was valid under New York v. Belton, and alternatively that Nichols could have conducted an inventory search of the automobile. A jury convicted petitioner on all three counts; he was sentenced to 180 months’ imprisonment and 8 years of supervised release.
Ignoring the fact that Thornton was charged with violating federal laws which are actually void from their inception — since the Constitution does not give authority to the federal government to define such activities as crimes in the first place — it should be recognized that he was foolish to consent to be searched, or to answer questions at all. If he had not done so, the drugs presumably would not have been found, and the pretext for the search of his car would not have existed. It is also interesting that the officer, under the pretext of concern for his own safety, asked Thornton if he had any drugs. One must wonder how Nichols felt his safety might be threatened by drugs in Thornton’s pockets.
Although not all contraband in the passenger compartment is likely to be accessible to a “recent occupant,” the need for a clear rule, readily understood by police and not depending on differing estimates of what items were or were not within an arrestee’s reach at any particular moment, justifies the sort of generalization which Belton enunciated.
This idea of a clear rule, also referred to as a “bright-line rule,” is given as justification for expanding the reach of previous rulings. As time goes on, new situations arise which are said to require a new line to be drawn, ad infinitum. As we continue, it will be seen that the Court admitted that the underlying reason for allowing searches of the passenger compartment of vehicles in the first place may not even exist in a particular situation. Nevertheless, they deem it more important to have bright-line rules than to protect the rights of the people in the situations they actually encountered. In other words, it is better that some citizens’ rights be violated than take the chance that a police officer might be unsure whether or not he has authority to search such citizens’ cars. This should be a concern for us all, since this type of progression has no end.
In New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981), we held that when a police officer has made a lawful custodial arrest of an occupant of an automobile, the Fourth Amendment allows the officer to search the passenger compartment of that vehicle as a contemporaneous incident of arrest.
However, the Belton case did not address arrests made of “recent occupants.” Earlier cases raising that issue were decided on other grounds, and so left the question open.
We now reach that question and conclude that Belton governs even when an officer does not make contact until the person arrested has left the vehicle. … Noting that petitioner conceded that he was in “close proximity, both temporally and spatially,” to his vehicle, the court concluded that the car was within petitioner’s immediate control, and thus Nichols’ search was reasonable under Belton. 325 F.3d, at 196. We granted certiorari, 540 U.S.___(2003), and now affirm.
In Belton, an officer overtook a speeding vehicle on the New York Thruway and ordered its driver to pull over. Suspecting that the occupants possessed marijuana, the officer directed them to get out of the car and arrested them for unlawful possession. He searched them and then searched the passenger compartment of the car. We considered the constitutionally permissible scope of a search in these circumstances and sought to lay down a workable rule governing that situation.
We first referred to Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969), a case where the arrestee was arrested in his home, and we had described the scope of a search incident to a lawful arrest as the person of the arrestee and the area immediately surrounding him. This rule was justified by the need to remove any weapon the arrestee might seek to use to resist arrest or to escape, and the need to prevent the concealment or destruction of evidence. Although easily stated, the Chimel principle had proved difficult to apply in specific cases.
The justifications which make such a search reasonable obviously do not apply to the search of areas to which the accused does not have ready physical access. This is not enough, however, to prove such searches unconstitutional. The Court has always held, and does not today deny, that when there is probable cause to search and it is 'impracticable' for one reason or another to get a search warrant, then a warrantless search may be reasonable.
In all relevant aspects, the arrest of a suspect who is next to a vehicle presents identical concerns regarding officer safety and the destruction of evidence as the arrest of one who is inside the vehicle. An officer may search a suspect’s vehicle under Belton only if the suspect is arrested. A custodial arrest is fluid and “[t]he danger to the police officer flows from the fact of the arrest, and its attendant proximity, stress, and uncertainty.” The stress is no less merely because the arrestee exited his car before the officer initiated contact, nor is an arrestee less likely to attempt to lunge for a weapon or to destroy evidence if he is outside of, but still in control of, the vehicle. In either case, the officer faces a highly volatile situation. It would make little sense to apply two different rules to what is, at bottom, the same situation.
Using this same reasoning, it is easy to see how the clear rule could be expanded to include even a five-mile area, since someone might run that far in his attempt to escape. In fact, in his concurring opinion, Justice Scalia referred to a case where an arrestee ran handcuffed through a forest to a house, grabbed a fireplace poker, and struck an officer. That man was shot dead. If he had lived, perhaps his case would have been used to justify searches of all homes in the area of an arrest.
In this next quote, Justice Rehnquist himself acknowledged that the bright-line rule being established will sometimes act to extend the “principle” upon which the Chimel rule was originally devised, but he deems clear rules to be more important than citizens’ rights.
To be sure, not all contraband in the passenger compartment is likely to be readily accessible to a “recent occupant.” It is unlikely in this case that petitioner could have reached under the driver’s seat for his gun once he was outside of his automobile. But the firearm and the passenger compartment in general were no more inaccessible than were the contraband and the passenger compartment in Belton. The need for a clear rule, readily understood by police officers and not depending on differing estimates of what items were or were not within reach of an arrestee at any particular moment, justifies the sort of generalization which Belton enunciated. Once an officer determines that there is probable cause to make an arrest, it is reasonable to allow officers to ensure their safety and to preserve evidence by searching the entire passenger compartment.
Although the opinion is a logical extension of the holding of New York v. Belton, I write separately to express my dissatisfaction with the state of the law in this area. As JUSTICE SCALIA forcefully argues, (opinion concurring in judgment), lower court decisions seem now to treat the ability to search a vehicle incident to the arrest of a recent occupant as a police entitlement rather than as an exception justified by the twin rationales of Chimel v. California. That erosion is a direct consequence of Belton’s shaky foundation.
Rather than clarifying the constitutional limits of a Belton search, petitioner’s “contact initiation” rule would obfuscate them. Under petitioner’s proposed rule, an officer approaching a suspect who has just alighted from his vehicle would have to determine whether he actually confronted or signaled confrontation with the suspect while he remained in the car, or whether the suspect exited his vehicle unaware of, and for reasons unrelated to, the officer’s presence. This determination would be inherently subjective and highly fact specific, and would require precisely the sort of ad hoc determinations on the part of officers in the field and reviewing courts that Belton sought to avoid. Experience has shown that such a rule is impracticable, and we refuse to adopt it. So long as an arrestee is the sort of “recent occupant” of a vehicle such as petitioner was here, officers may search that vehicle incident to the arrest.
Unwilling to confine the Belton rule to the narrow class of cases it was designed to address, the Court extends Belton’s reach without supplying any guidance for the future application of its swollen rule. We are told that officers may search a vehicle incident to arrest “[s]o long as [the] arrestee is the sort of ‘recent occupant’ of a vehicle such as petitioner was here.” But we are not told how recent is recent, or how close is close, perhaps because in this case “the record is not clear.” As the Court cautioned in Belton itself, “[w]hen a person cannot know how a court will apply a settled principle to a recurring factual situation, that person cannot know the scope of his constitutional protection, nor can a policeman know the scope of his authority.” Without some limiting principle, I fear that today’s decision will contribute to “a massive broadening of the automobile exception,” when officers have probable cause to arrest an individual but not to search his car.
The bright-line rule crafted in Belton is not needed for cases in which the arrestee is first accosted when he is a pedestrian, because Chimel itself provides all the guidance that is necessary. The only genuine justification for extending Belton to cover such circumstances is the interest in uncovering potentially valuable evidence. In my opinion, that goal must give way to the citizen’s constitutionally protected interest in privacy when there is already in place a well-defined rule limiting the permissible scope of a search of an arrested pedestrian. The Chimel rule should provide the same protection to a “recent occupant” of a vehicle as to a recent occupant of a house.
There is nothing irrational about broader police authority to search for evidence when and where the perpetrator of a crime is lawfully arrested. The fact of prior lawful arrest distinguishes the arrestee from society at large, and distinguishes a search for evidence of his crime from general rummaging. Moreover, it is not illogical to assume that evidence of a crime is most likely to be found where the suspect was apprehended. … In this case, as in Belton, petitioner was lawfully arrested for a drug offense. It was reasonable for Officer Nichols to believe that further contraband or similar evidence relevant to the crime for which he had been arrested might be found in the vehicle from which he had just alighted and which was still within his vicinity at the time of arrest. I would affirm the decision below on that ground.
In Chimel v. California, we held that a search incident to arrest was justified only as a means to find weapons the arrestee might use or evidence he might conceal or destroy. We accordingly limited such searches to the area within the suspect’s “‘immediate control’”—i.e., “the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m].” In New York v. Belton, we set forth a bright-line rule for arrests of automobile occupants, holding that, because the vehicle’s entire passenger compartment is “in fact generally, even if not inevitably,” within the arrestee’s immediate control, a search of the whole compartment is justified in every case.
When petitioner’s car was searched in this case, he was neither in, nor anywhere near, the passenger compartment of his vehicle. Rather, he was handcuffed and secured in the back of the officer’s squad car. The risk that he would nevertheless “grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m]” from his car was remote in the extreme. The Court’s effort to apply our current doctrine to this search stretches it beyond its breaking point, and for that reason I cannot join the Court’s opinion.
It has long been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression, ... that the germ of dissolution of our Federal Government is in the constitution of the Federal Judiciary—an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States and the government be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed.
The systematic erosion of our rights through judicial legislation is laying the groundwork for a total police state. It helps to perpetuate the illusion of a legal framework in which to enforce your rights, while simultaneously reducing those rights to worthless shadows. It keeps the citizens pacified until the militarization of the police allows for the successful merging of civil law enforcement and military authority — a standing army as dangerous to a free people as any our Founding Fathers envisioned. When the judicial branch fails to stand between a tyrannical government and its citizens, it is a signpost that Liberty is waning. When judges not only condone tyranny, but actively collude in it, the time of trouble is upon us. How long then before doors smashed down by ninja-suited SWAT teams, and neighbors carried off in the middle of the night for make-believe crimes, are considered normal parts of our everyday life? Or when scenes like Waco are repeated on a regular basis, except without any media coverage? It may not be this year, nor perhaps next, but can we really afford to hope it will never happen?
Correcting the course of our republic will not get easier by waiting until it is further off-track. Just like altering the course of a huge ocean liner, it takes a good bit of time to accomplish. So the time to act is now! Continue to educate yourself and help us educate others. Support the Fellowship’s plan to reestablish a radio network as an independent voice for American Liberty. Help make Freedom — and Truth — ring throughout the land.

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