Opinion ID: 1459439
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Searches Incident to Arrest

Text: Defendants also argue that they had the right to search Lyle, Dar, Erica, Christine, Mabou, and Jonathan incident to their arrests. Officers may perform searches incident to constitutionally permissible arrests in order to ensure their safety and safeguard evidence. Moore, 128 S.Ct. at 1607; United States v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 218, 235, 94 S.Ct. 467, 38 L.Ed.2d 427 (1973) (A custodial arrest of a suspect based on probable cause is a reasonable intrusion under the Fourth Amendment; that intrusion being lawful, a search incident to the arrest requires no additional justification. (quotation marks omitted)). A search incident to a custodial arrest, however, must be narrowly tailored. The search is limited to the area within the arrestee's immediate control and restricted to securing any weapons that the arrestee might use or evidence the arrestee might conceal. Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 763, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969). We have already concluded, based on the amended complaint, that defendants lacked probable cause to arrest Lyle, Dar, and Erica; therefore, the defendants' searches of them were not pursuant to lawful arrests. The same conclusion applies to the searches of Christine, Mabou, and Jonathan, which defendants argue were pursuant to seizures based on probable cause resulting in de facto arrests. Defendants have pointed to no particularized facts contained in the amended complaint supporting probable cause to lawfully arrest Christine, [30] Mabou, or Jonathan; thus, the searches of those three plaintiffs were not proximate to their lawful arrests. Overall, on the facts alleged in the amended complaint, Slocum, Rauls, LaCour, and Doyle violated Lyle's, Dar's, Erica's, Olivia's, Christine's, Carley's, Mabou's, and Jonathan's Fourth Amendment rights by searching and seizing them without probable cause or one of its substitutes; thus, we must determine if those rights were clearly established at the time of the searches and seizures.