Opinion ID: 594189
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Search of the Monte Carlo Incident to the Arrest

Text: 28 The district court found White's search of the car and Stout's subsequent seizure of the gun permissible under New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981). In Belton, the Court held that when a policeman has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, he may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of that automobile. Id. at 460 (footnotes omitted). Defendants argue that because they were not arrested while still in the Monte Carlo, the police had no authority to search under Belton. 29 Long before Belton, it was established that a warrantless search incident to a lawful arrest is limited to that area  'within the immediate control of the arrestee.'  Id. at 460 (citing Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969)). This exception to the warrant requirement was based on the need to disarm and to discover [destructible] evidence. Belton, 453 U.S. at 461 (citation omitted). Accordingly, areas within an arrestee's control included those area[s] into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m]. Id. at 460 (citation omitted). The Court bemoaned the absence of a workable definition of 'the area within the immediate control of the arrestee' when that area arguably includes the interior of an automobile and the arrestee is its recent occupant, id., and the attendant costs to law enforcement. Balancing automobile occupants' limited expectation of privacy in a vehicle's interior, which is further diminished upon the occupants' custodial arrest, against the practical necessities of law enforcement, the Belton court fashioned what it hoped would be a workable rule. 30 We made clear in United States v. White, 871 F.2d 41 (6th Cir.1989), that the Belton rule applies even when the arrestee is out of reach of the car and its contents. Id. at 44. Defendants acknowledge that, in this Circuit, our consistent reading of Belton has been that, once a police officer has effected a valid arrest, that officer can search the area that is or was within the arrestee's control. Id. (emphasis in original). They cite White and United States v. Hatfield, 815 F.2d 1068 (6th Cir.1987), however, for their supposition that a Belton search is permissible only if the arrest takes place while the suspect is in the vehicle. Moreover, if not so limited, they contend, under Belton, the search is too removed from its underlying justification--the need to protect arresting officers and preserve evidence. Defendants misread these decisions. 31 In both White and Hatfield, as in this case, the suspects were ordered outside their vehicles immediately prior to arrest. White, 871 F.2d at 42; Hatfield, 815 F.2d at 1070-71. Moreover, as we noted in White, in Belton itself, the defendants had been asked to get out of their car, arrested, 'patted down,' and 'split ... up into four separate areas of the Thruway,'  White, 871 F.2d at 44 (quoting Belton, 453 U.S. at 456), prior to the search. Nothing in these decisions implies that the arrest must occur before the suspects exit the vehicle. To the limited extent that the incident to the arrest exception has strayed from some of its earlier moorings, it was the Belton Court, in responding to the need for a workable rule, that set it free. 32 If we uphold the district court's ruling, defendants argue, our decision would authorize an arrest of a suspect at his place of employment and a contemporaneous search of the suspect's automobile in a parking garage which he had entered earlier in the day. We do not suggest that Belton is without limits. We merely reject the limit that defendants suggest. 33 Since defendants' Fourth Amendment rights were not violated, the evidence need not be suppressed. 34 AFFIRMED.