Opinion ID: 403620
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Searches of Rolenc's and Fleming's Paper Bags

Text: 17 In the excitement of the arrests, both Rolenc and Fleming dropped the paper bags they had been carrying. Bobko picked up Rolenc's bag and another officer picked up Fleming's. Fleming's bag was opened in his presence and immediately; Rolenc's bag was not opened for about five minutes, until after Rolenc had been disarmed, taken to the street, and handcuffed. Bobko and Rolenc were standing together when Rolenc's bag was opened. 18 Rolenc and Fleming argue that even if their arrests were valid and the police could seize the paper bags, the searches of (the) closed paper bags, after they had been recovered from the defendants and were securely in police custody, were illegal in the absence of a warrant, consent, or exigent circumstances (Br. 38). The (unstated) major premise of this argument is valid: a search incident to arrest can be undertaken without a warrant to prevent an arrested person from seizing a weapon or destroying evidence within his grabbing area, but the availability and scope of such a search cannot be expanded beyond the reasons for allowing it. Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 763, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 2040, 23 L.Ed.2d 685. The minor premise is less clear: once Rolenc was handcuffed, and once additional officers were entering Fleming's house to secure the premises, was each of the paper bags within the officers' custody and outside the grabbing area of either Fleming or Rolenc? The defendants-appellants think the answer is a self-evident yes, and they urge us to hold that because the danger addressed by a Chimel search had dissipated, so had any justification for opening the bags without a search warrant. 19 Precedent of the Supreme Court and this Circuit suggests that the right to conduct a Chimel search is not so evanescent. Rolenc and Fleming rely on United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 53 L.Ed.2d 538, but Chadwick is easily distinguishable. There the search of a 200-pound footlocker, more than an hour after it had been taken from a car's trunk and also after defendants had been locked in jail cells, was too remote in time and space from the initial arrest to qualify as a Chimel search. 8 United States v. Garcia, 605 F.2d 349 (7th Cir. 1979), certiorari denied, 446 U.S. 984, 100 S.Ct. 2966, 64 L.Ed.2d 841, on which the government relies, 9 is more to the point. There this Court upheld, on Chimel grounds, the virtually immediate search of two hand-carried suitcases that the suspect had dropped on being arrested. At the time of the search, one officer had the distraught suspect in hand (though not handcuffed), and the other had the suitcases in his possession. On these facts, the luggage could not yet be said to be in the exclusive control of the authorities, so as to render a Chimel search unreasonable. Id. at 355-356. While neither Chadwick nor Garcia is by itself dispositive, the facts in this appeal are surely closer to Garcia than to Chadwick. 20 Additional guidance is furnished by Belton v. New York, 453 U.S. 454, 101 S.Ct. 2860, 69 L.Ed.2d 768 (1981). In an opinion by Justice Stewart, the author of Chimel, the Supreme Court established a per se rule: when the occupant of an automobile is arrested, the entire passenger compartment of the car constitutes his grabbing area and can be searched as an incident of the arrest. Id. at 460, 101 S.Ct. at 2864. Although it is clear that Belton's per se rule is not transferrable to all Chimel searches, 10 it is noteworthy that the New York Court of Appeals, whose decision Belton reversed, 11 had accepted precisely the argument Fleming and Rolenc advocate here-that the occupants of the car, having been removed some distance from it, had no realistic chance to grab anything and therefore the need for a Chimel search no longer existed. The Belton Court instead emphasized that (t)he scope of (a) search must be 'strictly tied to and justified by' the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible, 12 and that (t)he authority to search the person incident to a lawful custodial arrest    does not depend on what a court may later decide was the probability in a particular arrest situation that weapons or evidence would in fact be found upon the person of a suspect. 13 21 A fair inference from this language is that a reviewing court, charged with the task of evaluating a Chimel search, must first put itself in the position of the law enforcement officers who initiated it. Here then we must decide whether, when Bobko and his colleague first picked them up, the bags were within Fleming's and Rolenc's grabbing area. They clearly were. Only after we have engaged in the same ex ante calculations that the police themselves faced should we consider whether subsequent events made a Chimel search unreasonable. 14 At this second level of inquiry it does not make sense to prescribe a constitutional test that is entirely at odds with safe and sensible police procedures. 15 Thus handcuffing Rolenc and having reinforcements enter Fleming's house should not be determinative, unless we intend to use the Fourth Amendment to impose on police a requirement that the search be absolutely contemporaneous with the arrest, no matter what the peril to themselves or to bystanders. It is surely possible for a Chimel search to be undertaken too long after the arrest and too far from the arrestee's person. That is the lesson of Chadwick. But we do not consider that the presence of more officers than suspects invalidated the immediate search of Fleming's bag. Nor do we think that a five-minute delay between seizing Rolenc's bag and opening it, occasioned by Bobko's handcuffing Rolenc and moving with him to the street, defeased Bobko's right to search under Chimel principles. 22 The conclusion that Rolenc's and Fleming's bags were properly searched as incidents of their arrests eliminates any need to consider the fall-back position of the defendants (and the government)-that Fleming and Rolenc did (or did not) have an expectation of privacy in their paper bags. 16 A valid search incident to arrest has as a corollary that any container may, of course, be searched, whether it is open or closed, since the justification for the search is not that the arrestee has no privacy in the container, but that the lawful custodial arrest justifies the infringement of any privacy interest the arrestee may have. Belton, supra, at 461, 101 S.Ct. at 2864.