Opinion ID: 1917628
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Belton

Text: In Belton, after stopping the car for speeding, a police officer came upon four men in the car and, while conversing with them, smelled burnt marijuana and saw an envelope inside the vehicle, which he associated with that substance. [43] The officer ordered all four out of the car, placed them under arrest for unlawful possession of marijuana, patted each of them down, split them into four separate locations on the Thruway, and searched the passenger compartment. [44] There he found marijuana in the envelope and cocaine in a jacket on the back seat belonging to Belton, who moved to suppress that evidence after his indictment for criminal possession of a controlled substance. [45] The New York Court of Appeals reversed the lower courts' denial of Belton's suppression motion, ruling that a warrantless search of the zippered pockets of an unaccessible jacket may not be upheld as a search incident to a lawful arrest where there is no longer any danger that the arrestee or a confederate might gain access to the article. [46] The Supreme Court reversed, announcing a bright line rule intended to approximate, as closely as possible, the scope of a search permitted by Chimel. Wrote Justice Stewart: [C]ourts have found no 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. . . . Accordingly, we hold 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. [47]