Opinion ID: 417957
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the legality of the warrantless, post-arrest search

Text: 22 Having concluded that Lyons possessed a justifiable expectation of privacy in his room and the closet therein, we must consider whether the warrantless, post-arrest search of the coat hanging in his closet complied with the dictates of the Fourth Amendment. Our analysis is shaped by one overarching principle: 23 [T]he most basic constitutional rule in this area is that searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment--subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions. The exceptions are jealously and carefully drawn, and there must be a showing by those who seek exemption ... that the exigencies of the situation made that course imperative. [T]he burden is on those seeking the exemption to show the need for it. 24 Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 454-55, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 2031-2032, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971) (footnotes omitted). Thus, the seizure of Lyons' gun will survive constitutional inhibition only if the Government can show that the surrounding facts brought it within one of the exceptions to the rule that a search must rest upon a search warrant. Stoner v. California, 376 U.S. at 486, 84 S.Ct. at 891 (quoting Rios v. United States, 364 U.S. 253, 261, 80 S.Ct. 1431, 1436, 4 L.Ed.2d 1688 (1960)). The Government has advanced two theories in hopes of making such a showing. We conclude, however, that neither of these doctrines is capable of legitimating the activities of the police in this instance; accordingly, we find that the search was unconstitutional and its produce should have been suppressed. 25
26 The Government first seeks to characterize the exploration of Lyons' closet as a search incident to a lawful arrest. Modern doctrine governing this well-recognized exception to the warrant requirement stems from Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969). The Supreme Court there held that, subsequent to a valid arrest, the police may legitimately search the suspect's person and his immediate environs. Id. at 762-63, 89 S.Ct. at 2039-2040. The scope of the search permitted under this rule is defined by reference to its rationale: 27 When an arrest is made, it is reasonable for the arresting officer to search the person arrested in order to remove any weapons that the latter might seek to use in order to resist arrest or effect his escape. Otherwise, the officer's safety might well be endangered, and the arrest itself frustrated. In addition, it is entirely reasonable for the arresting officer to search for and seize any evidence on the arrestee's person in order to prevent its concealment or destruction. And the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary items must, of course, be governed by a like rule. A gun on a table or in a drawer in front of one who is arrested can be as dangerous to the arresting officer as one concealed in the clothing of the person arrested. There is ample justification, therefore, for a search of the arrestee's person and the area within his immediate control--construing that phrase to mean the area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence. 28 There is no comparable justification, however, for routinely searching any room other than that in which an arrest occurs--or, for that matter, for searching through all the desk drawers or other closed or concealed areas in that room itself. Such searches, in the absence of well-recognized exceptions, may be made only under the authority of a search warrant. The adherence to judicial processes mandated by the Fourth Amendment requires no less. 29 Id. (footnote omitted). 30 The guidelines set forth in the foregoing passages have not been interpreted rigidly. Custodial arrests are often dangerous; the police must act decisively and cannot be expected to make punctilious judgments regarding what is within and what is just beyond the arrestee's grasp. Thus, searches have sometimes been upheld even when hindsight might suggest that the likelihood of the defendant reaching the area in question was slight. See, e.g., United States v. Mason, 523 F.2d 1122, 1125-26 (D.C.Cir.1975) (sustaining search of a closet three or four feet away from a standing, handcuffed defendant who had attempted to obtain a jacket hanging therein). And it has been held that an arresting officer is not obliged, before searching an arrestee's immediate vicinity, to calculate the probability that weapons or destructible evidence may be involved. United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. at 15, 97 S.Ct. at 2485 (dicta). But the touchstone remains the justification articulated in Chimel. To determine whether a warrantless search incident to an arrest exceeded constitutional bounds, a court must ask: was the area in question, at the time it was searched, 12 conceivably accessible to the arrestee--assuming that he was neither an acrobat [nor] a Houdini? United States v. Mapp, 476 F.2d 67, 80 (2d Cir.1973); accord United States v. Scios, 590 F.2d 956, 964 n. 15 (D.C.Cir.1978) (en banc); United States v. Griffith, 537 F.2d 900, 904 (7th Cir.1976). 31 The search of the closet in the instant case clearly was beyond the pale demarcated by Chimel and its progeny. At the time of the search, Lyons was sitting, handcuffed, on a chair near the doorway. Inside the room were six police officers, at least four of whom presumably were armed. The closet was located at the far end of the wall adjacent to that in which the doorway was located--several yards away from Lyons. Under these circumstances, it is inconceivable that Lyons could have gained access to the area. It is also clear that Lyons never made any attempt to reach the closet, nor did he even request access to it. 32 The Government might appeal to one of two subsidiary doctrines in an effort to avoid the force of the foregoing reasoning. First, it might argue that Lyons needed the coat to wear on the way to the station house; surely it was reasonable for them to check it for weapons before giving it to him. Assuming without deciding that the police have constitutional authority unilaterally to decide what extra clothing an arrestee needs and then to locate and search those articles, 13 such authority would avail them little in this case; the Government conceded that the police did not anticipate giving--and did not in fact give--the coat to Lyons. 33 Second, it has been held that, when the police have reason to suspect that confederates of an arrestee are hiding somewhere in the room or house in which (or near which) the arrest takes place and might attempt to liberate their comrade, the police may legitimately search the area more thoroughly than would otherwise be permitted. See United States v. Irizarry, 673 F.2d at 558; United States v. Dien, 609 F.2d 1038, 1047 (2d Cir.1979) (dicta), aff'd, 615 F.2d 10 (2d Cir.1980). Clearly, however, there were no such exigent circumstances in this case. The police had been following Lyons' movements for two days, and Centrella and Bland had just spent a significant amount of time in the room with him; the police thus knew to a certainty that Lyons was alone when he was arrested. 34 In sum, we conclude that this case is controlled by the principle that a warrantless search remote in time or place from the arrest is not, for constitutional purposes, a search incident to that arrest. Preston v. United States, 376 U.S. 364, 367, 84 S.Ct. 881, 883, 11 L.Ed.2d 777 (1964). 35
36 The second theory advanced by the Government is that the activity that resulted in the discovery of Lyons' gun was not a search at all, but rather an inventory of his belongings incident to their lawful impoundment by the police. The Government insists that such a procedure, designed to protect the arrestee's property rather than to gather information for use in a criminal prosecution, requires no prior judicial approval. 37 It should be noted, at the outset, that there can be no serious question that the acts of gathering together Lyons' belongings, reducing them to police custody, and inventorying them constituted a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Though the Supreme Court has not specifically so held, 14 it seems indisputable that such a serious invasion of a citizen's expectations of privacy must be governed by the strictures of the Fourth Amendment; the fact that the intrusion was not motivated by a desire to unearth evidence of criminality does not render the Constitution inapplicable. See United States v. Lawson, 487 F.2d 468, 472 (8th Cir.1973); 2 W. LAFAVE, SEARCH AND SEIZURE 564-65 (1978). 15 Nevertheless, warrantless inventory searches have, in some contexts, been held to satisfy the Fourth Amendment standard of reasonableness. 16 To assess the Government's theory, we must decide whether the considerations that justify the use of such a procedure in other situations are sufficiently implicated by the activities of the police in the instant case to enable their conduct to pass constitutional muster. 38 The seminal decision in this area is South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 96 S.Ct. 3092, 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976). The Supreme Court there upheld an inventory search of a lawfully impounded car. The Court pointed to four factors to support its conclusion that the practice was reasonable for constitutional purposes. First, a citizen is entitled to only a diminished expectation of privacy in his automobile--significantly less than that relating to [his] home or office. Id. at 367-68, 96 S.Ct. at 3096. 17 Second, inventories of the contents of cars to be kept in police custody promote important public and private interests--the protection of the owner's property while it remains in police custody; the protection of the police against claims or disputes over lost or stolen property; and the protection of the police from potential danger. Id. at 369, 96 S.Ct. at 3097 (citations omitted). Third, in the case before the Court, the owner of the car was not present to make other arrangements for the safekeeping of his belongings. Id. at 375, 96 S.Ct. at 3100. 18 Fourth, the inventory was conducted in accordance with a standard police procedure, essentially like that followed throughout the country, and there was no evidence that utilization of the procedure was a pretext concealing an investigatory police motive. Id. at 369, 376, 96 S.Ct. at 3097, 3100. 39 In situations involving similar complexes of concerns, inventory searches of other belongings or containers impounded by the police have been upheld. See, e.g., United States v. Grill, 484 F.2d 990, 991-92 (5th Cir.1973) (police may search a suitcase lawfully taken into custody, to make an inventory of the contents and to see if it contained explosive devices or other materials that might pose a danger to the warehouse or other stored items), cert. denied, 416 U.S. 989, 94 S.Ct. 2396, 40 L.Ed.2d 767 (1974); United States v. Diggs, 544 F.2d 116, 125 (3d Cir.1976) (en banc) (opinion of Gibbons, J. [which controlled the result in the case] (federal agents lawfully in possession of a locked box [transferred to them by a gratuitous bailee without the knowledge or consent of the owner] have constitutional authority to make an inventory search of its contents), subsequent disposition aff'd, 569 F.2d 1264 (3d Cir.1977). 40 To date, however, no federal court has upheld a warrantless search of a place of abode on the ground that the police had a legitimate interest in inventorying and impounding its contents. Only two cases might, at first glance, appear to support such an extension of the inventory search doctrine; upon examination, however, each proves to have involved a search justified by unrelated considerations. In United States v. Lacey, 530 F.2d 821 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 845, 97 S.Ct. 125, 50 L.Ed.2d 115 (1976), the Eighth Circuit ruled that money discovered by the police in the defendant's apartment was lawfully taken into custody for the sole purpose of safekeeping, since the apartment door could not be secured after it had been forced during entry. Id. at 823. But the money had not been discovered initially through an inventory search, but, rather, through a concededly lawful search undertaken pursuant to a valid warrant. Id. Similarly, in United States v. Lipscomb, 435 F.2d 795 (5th Cir.1970), cert. denied, 401 U.S. 980, 91 S.Ct. 1213, 28 L.Ed.2d 331 (1971), the Fifth Circuit held (using language superficially pertinent to the instant case) that it was reasonable for the police officers to take all the arrested couple's personal belongings to headquarters, for the hotel management could not reasonably have been expected to permit those belongings to remain indefinitely in the vacated room. Id. at 801. In justifying this conclusion, however, the court stressed the facts that Deering herself requested that [the belongings] be taken along, and Lipscomb did not offer any objection or suggest any other arrangement for the safekeeping of their possessions. Id. In short, collection of Lipscomb's property was justified by the consent of someone who at least appeared to be a co-owner. 19 In the only case in which the Government argued that the need to protect and inventory an arrestee's belongings, without more, justified a search of his hotel room, the contention was rejected out of hand; in United States v. Griffith, the Seventh Circuit held that the inventory search exemption could not be invoked when the arrestee's belongings were in his permanent or temporary dwelling. 537 F.2d at 905. 20 41 To uphold the application of the inventory search theory to the facts of the instant case would thus entail a substantial doctrinal innovation. Taking into account the four factors identified by the Supreme Court as the basis for its decision in Opperman, we conclude that such an extension of the theory would be improper. 42 For the sake of argument, we assume that the second and fourth of the considerations relied upon by the Court in Opperman are equally telling in the present context. In other words, we assume that, by collecting and inventorying Lyons' belonging, the police reduced the likelihood that those goods would be lost or stolen, shielded themselves from possible civil liability, and protected themselves from any inherently dangerous objects that might have been contained in his property. 21 And we accept, arguendo, the Government's allegation that the procedure was required by police regulations. 22 We observe, however, that, in terms of the first and third factors, this case differs radically from Opperman. We have demonstrated that the space invaded by the police in the course of the inventory was Lyons' temporary dwelling--in which he had a legitimate privacy interest equivalent to that of a homeowner in his bedroom. See Part II, supra. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly noted, citizens' interests in the privacy of their homes may be overridden only upon a showing of public interests considerably more compelling than those necessary to justify intrusion into automobiles. Compare, e.g., United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543, 561, 96 S.Ct. 3074, 3084, 49 L.Ed.2d 1116 (1976), and Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U.S. 583, 590-91, 94 S.Ct. 2464, 2469, 41 L.Ed.2d 325 (1974) (plurality opinion), with, e.g., Silverman v. United States, 365 U.S. at 511, 81 S.Ct. at 682, and McDonald v. United States, 335 U.S. 451, 455-56, 69 S.Ct. 191, 193, 93 L.Ed. 153 (1948). Equally importantly, in this case the owner of the goods was present at the time of the search and easily could have been asked whether he wished the police to collect them or whether he wanted to make other arrangements for their safekeeping. 23 43 The foregoing differences between Opperman and the instant case seem to us decisive. We conclude that, given the importance of the privacy interests at stake, the failure of the police to consult with Lyons before assembling and searching his belongings was inconsistent with their constitutional obligations. 24