Opinion ID: 1542303
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Fourth Amendment and Traffic Violations

Text: The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. The United States Supreme Court has held that temporary detentions of persons during a motor vehicle stop by police constitutes a seizure of persons within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. [6] Accordingly, the Supreme Court has also held that a traffic stop must satisfy the Fourth Amendment requirement that it not be unreasonable under the circumstances. [7] As a general matter, the decision to stop an automobile is reasonable when the police have probable cause to believe that a traffic violation has occurred. [8] The United States Supreme Court has summarized its Fourth Amendment cases as foreclose[ing] any argument that the constitutional reasonableness of the traffic stop depends on the actual motivations of the individual officers involved. [9] The Supreme Court has held that a traffic violation arrest is not rendered invalid by the fact that it was `a mere pretext for a narcotics search' and that a lawful post-arrest search of the person would not be rendered invalid by the fact that it was not motivated by the officers' safety concern that justifies such searches. [10] In Prouse, the Supreme Court distinguished random traffic stops from probable cause to believe that a driver is violating any one of the multitude of applicable traffic and equipment regulations. [11] The Prouse decision noted that where police officers are required to act upon actual traffic violations that they observe, it will provide `the quantum of individualized suspicion' that is necessary to ensure the police discretion is sufficiently constrained. [12]