Opinion ID: 366539
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the search of the satchel

Text: 66 Milhollan contends that the police search of the blue satchel, which was closed and placed inside the automobile, violated his constitutionally protected expectation of privacy. Accordingly, he reasons, the trial court should not have permitted the $2400 and twenty-two money orders to be introduced as evidence. The majority rejects this argument, reasoning that any justification for searching Milhollan's car must, in the absence of pretext, also apply to the search of any of the contents of the car. Since, in the majority's estimation, the initial automotive search was justifiable, 1 and, moreover, since the satchel's contact with the automobile was more than incidental and . . . the intrusion into the automobile . . . not a pretext for a search of the satchel, Opinion, Post at 527, the search of the satchel was permissible. 67 I confess at the outset that there is some support for the majority's position. Justice Blackmun, in United States v. Chadwick, supra, 433 U.S. at 23 n.4, 97 S.Ct. at 2489, n.4, argued that (t)he scope of the 'automobile search' exception to the warrant requirement extends to the contents of locked compartments, including glove compartments and trunks. . . . The Courts of Appeals have construed this doctrine to include briefcases, suitcases, and footlockers inside automobiles. Justice Blackmun's opinion embraced a transfer theory for evaluating intrusions into closed luggage. That theory, which is indistinguishable from the majority's, essentially asserts that any justification to search a car is necessarily transferred even to closed items within it. 68 The catch, of course, is that Justice Blackmun's opinion in Chadwick was a dissent. The Chadwick majority, on the other hand, resoundingly rejected the broad exception to the Warrant Clause urged by Justice Blackmun. In Chadwick, itself, the defendants were arrested outside a Boston train station after having loaded a locked footlocker into an automobile trunk. The defendants and the unopened footlocker were transported to the federal building where federal officers effected a warrantless search of the footlocker. In so doing, they uncovered a large quantity of marijuana. The court of appeals sustained defendants' suppression motion and the Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the search violated defendants' rights under the Warrant Clause of the fourth amendment. 69 Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Burger observed, first, that 70 this Court has recognized significant differences between motor vehicles and other property which permit warrantless searches of automobiles in circumstances in which warrantless searches would not be reasonable in other contexts. 71 433 U.S. at 12, 97 S.Ct. at 2484. Specifically, he noted, automobiles have an inherent mobility, which often makes obtaining a judicial warrant impracticable. Id. Moreover, a diminished expectation of privacy . . . surrounds the automobile. Id. A car  'travels public thoroughfares where both its occupants and its contents are in plain view.'  Id. (quoting Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U.S. 583, 590, 94 S.Ct. 2464, 41 L.Ed.2d 325 (1974) (plurality opinion)). Luggage contents, on the other hand, 72 are not open to public view, . . . nor is luggage subject to regular inspections and official scrutiny on a continuing basis. Unlike an automobile, whose primary function is transportation, luggage is intended as a repository of personal effects. 73 Id. at 13, 97 S.Ct. at 2484. In addition, the Court reasoned, the footlocker's mobility does not justify dispensing with the added protections of the Warrant Clause. Id. 74 Once the federal agents had seized it at the railroad station and had safely transferred it to the Boston Federal Building under their exclusive control, there was not the slightest danger that the footlocker or its contents could have been removed before a valid search warrant could be obtained. The initial seizure and detention of the footlocker, the validity of which respondents do not contest, were sufficient to guard against any risk that evidence might be lost. With the footlocker safely immobilized, it was unreasonable to undertake the additional and greater intrusion of a search without a warrant. 75 Id. (footnotes omitted). Thus, the Court concluded, there were no exigent circumstances sufficient to override the defendants' privacy interest in the contents of the footlocker. 76 In the instant case, as in Chadwick, the contents of the blue satchel possessed all of the features of privacy elaborated by the Chief Justice. Moreover, with Milhollan safely in custody, the only known key to the Capri in police possession, and no known confederates at large, there was not the slightest risk of the satchel's removal. Thus the essential features in Chadwick a greater privacy interest and a lower mobility, or lack of exigency were firmly established. 77 Yet the majority purports to distinguish Chadwick by pointing to the merely brief contact that the footlocker in Chadwick had with the defendants' car. It urges that, because of this incidental contact, the search in Chadwick cannot be construed as an Automotive search, but rather must be seen as a separate Search of luggage, a search which the government tried to justify by relying on a novel exception to the Warrant Clause derived, by analogy, from the automobile exception. Insofar as Chadwick simply refused to Extend the automobile exception in that fashion, the majority surmises that it did not affect the legality of searches of items which are more than incidentally related to an automobile. Hence, the majority concludes, the instant search of the blue satchel, which transpired as part of an actual automotive search, is not governed by the ostensibly limited decision of the Court in Chadwick. But surely this is a distinction without a difference. The broad policies of privacy and immobility, in terms of which the Chadwick Court generally distinguished luggage from automobiles, apply to luggage of any sort, not simply that which has an incidental relationship to an automobile. The distinction, for constitutional purposes, between the contents of two satchels, one which was Just placed in a car and the other which was Already there, is one I find altogether chimerical. The Chadwick Court, I suggest, would be no less mystified. 2 The same holds true for most of the courts of appeals which have expressly considered this issue. 3 78 The majority is apparently uncomfortable with the distinctions drawn by the Supreme Court between automobiles and luggage. Thus, it chooses, despite the Court's explicit direction to the contrary, to import the rationale for automobile searches into a domain where it simply does not fit. This effort at legal gymnastics is attempted so that, in the majority's words, (p)ermission to search an automobile is not rendered hollow indeed. . . .  Opinion, Ante at 527. But regardless of the majority's desire to assist in law enforcement, it efforts to square a doctrinal circle particularly given the doubtful validity of the permission to effect the initial search of the car 4 is unjustifiable.