Court Opinion

ID: 9465047
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 00:34:13.452782+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:56.783303
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
I concur in the result and in most of the reasoning of the thorough majority opinion. I am unable to agree, however, that since the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 53 L.Ed.2d 538 (1977), the rule remains that all warrantless automobile searches require both probable cause and exigent circumstances;1 I think that probable cause now suffices standing alone.
As we recently held in United States v. McLaughlin, 578 F.2d 1180, at 1183 (5th Cir. 1978):
The remaining question is whether customs officials violated the fourth amendment in searching the vehicle without first obtaining a warrant. We think that they did not for two reasons. First is the exigent circumstance that McLaughlin and his passenger might have returned to remove or destroy the contraband. See Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 462, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971). Any officers standing watch over the car while a warrant was being obtained would have been particularly vulnerable given the time of night and the suspects’ ability to use the Garcia house as cover. Even if these circumstances were not sufficiently exigent, however, we would still uphold the search on the strength of the Supreme Court’s language in United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 53 L.Ed.2d 538 (1977). In that case the Court observed that it had previously sanctioned warrantless auto searches in the absence of any exigencies created by the mobility or vulnerability of the searched vehicle. 97 S.Ct. at 2484. Accord Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 441-42, 93 S.Ct. 2523, 37 L.Ed.2d 706 (1973). See South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 96 S.Ct. 3092, 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976); Texas v. White, 423 U.S. 67, 96 S.Ct. 304, 46 L.Ed.2d 209 (1975); Chambers v. Maroney, 399 U.S. 42, 90 S.Ct. 1975, 26 L.Ed.2d 419 (1970); Cooper v. California, 386 U.S. 58, 87 S.Ct. 788, 17 L.Ed.2d 730 (1967). The justification for those searches was, instead, the “dimin*1149ished expectation of privacy which surrounds the automobile.” United States v. Chadwick, 97 S.Ct. at 2484. As the Court noted, automobiles seldom serve as repositories of personal effects; they travel public thoroughfares where both occupants and contents are in plain view and are themselves subject to extensive government regulation. 97 S.Ct. at 2484. Accord South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. at 367-68, 96 S.Ct. 3092.
We take the Court’s analysis in Chadwick to mean that warrantless searches are the general rule. This much seems clear since in that case the Court justified its holding, that luggage is immune from warrantless searches absent exigent circumstances, by distinguishing the privacy interest in luggage and similar items from that in automobiles.2 Of course, it
2 By contrast, in Coolidge v. New Hampshire, which greatly emphasized the need for exigent circumstances in warrantless auto searches, the Court stated that if cars could be searched without warrants and in the absence of exigent circumstances, so could luggage. 403 U.S. at 461 n. 18, 91 S.Ct. 2022. still may not be true that “in every conceivable circumstance the search of an auto even with probable cause may be made without the extra protection for privacy that a warrant affords,” Chambers v. Maroney, 399 U.S. at 50, 90 S.Ct. 1981, but we find nothing exceptional about the search in this case.
Since I find nothing exceptional about the search in this case either, I would apply the general rule of Chadwick, grounded in the diminished expectation of privacy which attends automobiles. I would do so in the belief that the Supreme Court has recognized that its recent opinions have attenuated the concept of mobility as a basis for exigence in automobile searches to such a degree that it has become almost a fictional concept, a sort of “mobility-in-law.” So recognizing, with Chadwick it shifted the analysis to the sounder basis of diminished expectation of privacy, and I think we should recognize this.