Opinion ID: 1395862
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: intensity of search

Text: McCoy argues that even though a search of his jacket pocket may have been authorized as a search incident to an arrest, the scope of the search became impermissibly intensive when Officer Weaver opened the plastic wrapped foil packet which the officer found in the pocket of his jacket. [13] It is contended that once the foil packet was removed from McCoy's control, the police officer was not endangered by any weapons that might have been concealed in the foil packet, and that any evidence in the foil packet was safe from destruction. In such circumstances, McCoy argues that in order to look inside the packet Officer Weaver should have first obtained a search warrant. This argument raises the most troublesome questions presented in this appeal, and has provoked considerable disagreement among the members of this Court. Any attempted answer must, of course, first consider the United States Supreme Court's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment since its decisions are binding upon the respective states. [14] The Fourth Amendment states: [15] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. In interpreting this language, the Supreme Court has held that the principle of antecedent justification is so central to the Fourth Amendment that subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.     [16] In this case, however, we deal with a long-recognized exception to the warrant requirement for searches of the person incident to a valid arrest. [17] For a time the exception, which reached its zenith in United States v. Rabinowitz, [18] was read more broadly than the rule. Rabinowitz upheld a warrantless search of the desk, safe and file cabinets in the office where the defendant was arrested. The Court held that since the items seized were in an area within the defendant's immediate control the search was reasonable, the relevant test being not whether it was reasonable to obtain a search warrant beforehand, but rather whether the search itself was reasonable. [19] It is not surprising, given the permissiveness of the Rabinowitz rule, that police timed their arrests carefully in order to indulge in extensive general searches of the place where defendant was arrested, often his home. [20] This practice was condemned, however, in Chimel v. California [21] which severely limited the permissible scope of the search incident to an arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement and which is consequently the most appropriate point of departure for our analysis of the search of the packet. In Chimel, after the defendant was arrested in his home for burglary pursuant to a valid arrest warrant, the police officers conducted an extensive warrantless search of his home and uncovered various items which were subsequently introduced at defendant's trial over his objection. The United States Supreme Court reversed the California Supreme Court which had held that the warrantless search of defendant's home was justified as incident to a valid arrest. The Court held that since the search went far beyond defendant's person and the area into which he could reach to obtain a weapon to harm the officer or escape or evidence which he might conceal or destroy that it was unreasonable under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. In setting out the boundaries of the area which could be searched under the search incident to an arrest exception, the Court in Chimel relied on the two rationales for the exception suggested by Justice Frankfurter in his dissent in United States v. Rabinowitz. [22] Frankfurter suggested the exception was necessary first, in order to protect the arresting officer and to deprive the prisoner of potential means of escape    and, secondly, to avoid destruction of evidence by the arrested person.    From this it follows that officers may search and seize not only the things physically on the person arrested, but those within his immediate physical control. [23] Thus, in Chimel the Court said: [I]t is reasonable for the arresting officer to search the person arrested in order to remove any weapons that the latter might seek to use in order to resist arrest or effect his escape. Otherwise, the officer's safety might well be endangered, and the arrest itself frustrated. In addition, it is entirely reasonable for the arresting officer to search for and seize any evidence on the arrestee's person in order to prevent its concealment or destruction. And the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary items must, of course, be governed by a like rule.    There is ample justification, therefore, for a search of the arrestee's person and the area `within his immediate control'   . There is no comparable justification, however, for routinely searching any room other than that in which an arrest occurs   . [24] Since there was no danger that Chimel would obtain weapons or destructible evidence from areas of the house outside his immediate control, the Court held the search was unreasonable under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Our dissenting brothers suggest that Frankfurter's twin rationales also supply the analysis for judging the propriety of searches of the arrestee's person as well as his environs. They reason that after the officer had taken possession of the packet there was no danger that McCoy might remove from it a weapon, an implement of escape, or destructible evidence. Consequently, they argue, the exigency justification of the search evaporated and the warrant requirement attached. We do not believe that this is a correct interpretation of Chimel. While it is clear from Chimel that the twin rationales suggested by Frankfurter supply the appropriate analytic scheme to define the area within [the arrestee's] immediate control, [25] it by no means follows that they also supply the appropriate analysis for limiting searches of the arrestee's person; further, there is language in Chimel which suggests that the court did not intend them to do so. Chimel was concerned not with searches of the person, but with the wide-ranging warrantless searches of dwellings which Rabinowitz had legitimized on the ground that it was the place where the arrest occurred. The scope of the problem prior to Chimel is apparent from a reading of Harris v. United States, [26] which upheld the introduction of evidence from a five-hour warrantless search of a four-room apartment as incident to an arrest in the apartment. Thus, while Chimel overruled Rabinowitz and Harris, the Court was careful to distinguish Weeks v. United States, [27] in which Justice Day had stated in dictum that English and American law had always recognized the power to search the person of the accused when legally arrested, to discover and seize the fruits or evidences of the crime. [28] Moreover, the passage from Chimel quoted above and the following passages support the conclusion that the Court did not intend to limit the intensity of searches of the person incident to a lawful arrest but was concerned instead only with limiting searches of the area surrounding him when he was arrested: The search here went far beyond the petitioner's person and the area from within which he might have obtained either a weapon or something that could have been used as evidence against him. There was no constitutional justification, in the absence of a search warrant, for extending the search beyond that area. The scope of the search was, therefore, `unreasonable' under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, and the petitioner's conviction cannot stand. [29] (emphasis added)       No consideration relevant to the Fourth Amendment suggests any point of rational limitation, once the search is allowed to go beyond the area from which the person arrested might obtain weapons or evidentiary items. The only reasoned distinction is one between a search of the person arrested and the area within his reach on the one hand, and more extensive searches on the other. [30] (emphasis added) The last two sentences are critical. The Court is saying, it seems to us, that once warrantless searches beyond the area of the arrestee's immediate control are allowed, the Fourth Amendment with its reasonableness requirement suggests no rational limits to circumscribe the search. Searches of the person, on the other hand, have their own inherent physical limitations. Thus, there is less danger that this exception to the warrant requirement will become unrestrained. We do not mean to suggest that no limitations on incidental searches of the person would be appropriate, but rather that those dangers of unlimited expansion of the scope of the search present in the case of searches of dwellings are not present here. Chimel, however, would not seem to impose the additional restriction that the incidental search be allowed only when there is danger to the police officer or to the evidence; that opinion was simply not directed at the problem now before this court. A similar reading of Chimel is advanced by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit: [31] We read Chimel as being acutely concerned about the increasing legitimation of wide-ranging warrantless searches of lodgings and buildings based on the fortuity of arrest on the premises, which had been ushered in by United States v. Rabinowitz, (citation omitted). That search of the person was not the evil addressed is apparent from the early references in Chimel, distinguishing Weeks v. United States, (citation omitted) and Carroll v. United States [267 U.S. 132, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543.] (citation omitted), and from the Court's own language.    [32] A second point requiring discussion is that to accept appellant's argument that a warrant was required to look inside the packet would require us to fashion a distinction between the power to search and the power to seize which has not been recognized by the cases in this area. McCoy concedes that under Chimel the police had the power to seize the packet to prevent the destruction of its contents or their use against the officers, but argues that a warrant was required before it could be searched. The Supreme Court cases, however, have treated the power to search and the power to seize as concomitants although it is debatable whether the Court has focused upon this issue. Appellant argues, and our dissenting brothers imply, that support for the purported distinction between search and seizure can be found in the rationale for the stop-and-frisk cases, Terry v. Ohio, [33] and Sibron v. New York. [34] Thus, in Terry the Court in upholding the introduction of a pistol discovered in a frisk for weapons, cautioned that a search which is reasonable at its inception may violate the Fourth Amendment by virtue of its intolerable intensity and scope.    The scope of the search must be `strictly tied to and justified by' the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible. [35] The exigency having disappeared when the officer seized the packet, the argument runs, the quoted language from Terry would invalidate the search. We do not find this reasoning persuasive. While Sibron and Terry did require that warrantless searches in stop and frisk situations be no more intensive than necessary to uncover weapons endangering the officer, it does not follow that searches of a person incident to arrest should be similarly limited. The stop and frisk doctrine, a limited exception to the rule that officers can detain a person only on probable cause, is designed to aid police officers in street encounters where suspicious circumstances exist not amounting to probable cause. [36] After a proper arrest on probable cause, however, the same reasons for so severely limiting the search are not present. The scope of a protective search for weapons in a stop and frisk situation should be more limited than a search incident to an arrest, for even under the dissent's reading of Chimel an additional justification is present, namely, the need to prevent the destruction of evidence. Further, although in Chimel the Court approved the application of the Terry-Sibron reasoning to the search incident to arrest principle, [37] it did so to define the limits of incidental searches of the area surrounding the arrestee at the time of arrest and not to restrain incidental searches of the person. That Sibron and Terry do not support the suggested distinction between the power to search and the power to seize is also a necessary conclusion of a careful reading of the companion case to the decisions, Peters v. New York. [38] Peters was convicted on the strength of burglary tools uncovered in a search of his person for weapons. The search was conducted after the officer had stopped Peters who had been prowling around in the apartment building where the officer lived. Officer Lasky patted Peters down for weapons, and discovered a hard object in his pocket. He stated at the hearing that the object did not feel like a gun, but that it might have been a knife. He removed the object from Peters' pocket. It was an opaque plastic envelope, containing burglar's tools. (Emphasis added) [39] The Court held that the officer had probable cause to arrest Peters and that the search was valid as incident to the arrest. What is important for our purposes, however, is that the burglar's tools were inside an opaque plastic envelope. The Court therefore held that it was proper not only to seize the packet but to look inside and search it incident to Peters' arrest. What the Court did not require was that the officer get a search warrant before he looked inside the packet. This was so even though the Court stated that the search was justified `by the need to seize weapons and other things which might be used to assault an officer or effect an escape, as well as by the need to prevent the destruction of evidence of the crime.' [40] These, of course, are the twin rationales for the Chimel incidental search exception, upon which appellant's argument is based. Thus, even though the officer's possession of the plastic envelope removed the danger to the officer's person and thereby displaced the exigency justification for the search, the Court held it was proper to look inside without a warrant. Such close facts are highly persuasive; they demonstrate that Frankfurter's twin rationales, crystallized into constitutional doctrine by Chimel, do not compel reversal here. [41] Although Peters preceded Chimel, it contains a strong indication that Sibron and Terry will not support the extension of Chimel claimed by the appellant. Several other Supreme Court decisions construing the Fourth Amendment also merit discussion. The first is Chambers v. Maroney [42] which upheld a warrantless search of the automobile in which defendant was arrested after it had been seized and taken to police headquarters. Chambers is relevant for two reasons. The first is that it contains language which would seem to further undermine any foundation for the purported differentiation between search and seizure: Arguably, because of the preference for a magistrate's judgment, only the immobilization of the car should be permitted until a search warrant is obtained; arguably, only the `lesser' intrusion is permissible until the magistrate authorizes the `greater'. But which is the `greater' and which is the `lesser' intrusion is itself a debatable question and the answer may depend on a variety of circumstances. For constitutional purposes, we see no difference between on the one hand seizing and holding a car before presenting the probable cause issue to a magistrate and on the other hand carrying out an immediate search without a warrant. Given probable cause to search, either course is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. (emphasis added) [43] The second point is that Chambers, by analogy, subverts McCoy's argument that a search of the person incident to an arrest is permissible only if the exigent circumstances justifying the search are present at the time the search is conducted. In Chambers the Court permitted a warrantless search after the automobile had been taken to police headquarters and the danger that it and any evidence it contained might disappear was no longer a factor. It was the apparent mobility of the automobile, stopped on a highway with its occupants alerted, that had persuaded the Court in Carroll v. United States [44] to fashion an exception to the warrant requirement. That the Court in Chambers permitted a later warrantless search even though the mobility factor was no longer present is a strong indication that the Court would not require the exigency to remain extant when dealing with other exceptions to the warrant requirement. [45] The analogy to McCoy's situation is fairly direct. The exigent circumstances were clearly present when the packet was in McCoy's possession at the time of arrest; the search, once justifiable, does not violate the Fourth Amendment remedy because the exigency is removed at the time the search is conducted. [46] The second case is Katz v. United States, [47] apparently cited by appellant for the proposition that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy as to the contents of the packet. We are not persuaded; the difference between a warrantless search and seizure of a conversation in a public telephone booth and a search of a packet in the possession of a person arrested for a crime, evidence of which might well have been contained inside, is readily apparent. The words of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit quoted above are worth repeating here: While the legal arrest of a person should not destroy the privacy of his premises, it does  for at least a reasonable time and to a reasonable extent  take his own privacy out of the realm of protection from police interest in weapons, means of escape, and evidence. [48] As a final consideration, it would appear that to place the magistrate between the police and the arrested person by requiring the police to get a warrant before any closed containers on the arrested person are searched, unnecessarily encumbers police investigations without providing any real additional protection for the arrestee. As a commentator in a 1969 law review note stated: What a lawful arrest does justify is the search for fruits, instrumentalities and evidence of the crime for which the arrest is made, and this is so only because the existence of probable cause for the arrest of a person normally justifies probable cause to believe that the suspect possesses such items. (emphasis in original) [49] That would seem to be true at least for crimes evidence of which can be concealed on the person, such as the one with which McCoy is charged. It is difficult to imagine a reasonable and intelligent magistrate refusing to grant a warrant in McCoy's case, for example. The packet might well have contained evidence of the forgery. Since the magistrate can be expected to issue the warrant as a matter of course whenever there is probable cause to make the arrest for a crime evidence of which could be concealed on the person, it would be meaningless and time-consuming to require the police to get a warrant. In this regard, the dissenters to Camara v. Municipal Court [50] and See v. City of Seattle, [51] made the following comments which would seem applicable here: [The majority] would permit the issuance of paper warrants    issued by the rubber stamp of a willing magistrate. In my view, this degrades the Fourth Amendment.          I ask: why go through such an exercise, such a pretense?    Why the ceremony, the delay, the expense, the abuse of the search warrant? (footnote omitted) [52] To require the police to get a search warrant to search the person of every felony arrestee when it is to be expected that the magistrate will always find probable cause that evidence of the crime is on his person, will inundate the magistrates with warrant petitions which will be granted as a matter of course and run the risk that magistrates will not carefully examine the circumstances in more deserving cases. Certainly the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures is at the very core of the protections needed to preserve democracy against the excesses of government. Consequently, the mere fact of arrest does not ipso facto justify an unlimited search of the person. In defining the boundaries of incident to the arrest exception, however, the need for the exercise of common sense is apparent. Although this opinion must not be read as a return to the Rabinowitz reasonableness approach to Fourth Amendment analysis heartily condemned in Chimel, it would seem that once we find ourselves within a recognized exception to the warrant requirement faced with the task of defining its scope common sense is not an inappropriate tool. We think that to require a warrant in the circumstances of this case would be a futile gesture which could hamstring legitimate police action without offering meaningful protection to the arrestee. Adequate protection for the arrestee's legitimate interests in privacy, however, will be provided by the following restrictions on warrantless incidental searches of the person: (1) The arrest must be valid  probable cause for the arrest must exist or the search is unconstitutional. [53] (2) The search must be roughly contemporaneous with the arrest, at least within the boundaries suggested by United States v. DeLeo, [54] and adopted here. [55] (3) The arrest must not be a pretext for the search; a search incident to a sham arrest is not valid. In Taglavore v. United States, [56] for example, where an arrest for a minor traffic violation was used as a pretext to search for marijuana, the court said, the search must be incident to the arrest, and not vice versa. [57] (4) Finally, the arrest must be for a crime, evidence of which could be concealed on a person. [58] While we are not bound by the United States Supreme Court's interpretations of the Fourth Amendment in expounding the corresponding section of the Alaska Constitution's Declaration of Rights, [59] article I, section 14, we do not find this case to be an appropriate one to expand those rights in Alaska beyond their federal counterparts. The extent of a valid search of a person charged with a crime is limited under our decision. Where there is probable cause to arrest for a particular crime of a type which can be evidenced by items concealed on the person there is little danger of a pretext arrest. In such circumstances the individual's rights of privacy must give way to the public need to investigate the crime. Since the search herein was incident to a valid arrest for the crime of forgery, and evidence of that crime might well have been concealed on McCoy's person, the search of the packet was valid and the conviction based on such evidence was proper. [60] The conviction is therefore affirmed.