Court Opinion

ID: 9427385
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:20:33.557508+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:06.726717
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Powell,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, concurring.
I concur in the opinion of the Court, and add these thoughts. I do not believe my dissenting Brethren correctly characterize the rationale of the Court’s opinion when they assert that it ties “the application of the Fourth Amendment ... to property law concepts.” Post, at 156-157. On the contrary, I read the Court’s opinion as focusing on whether there was a legitimate expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The petitioners do not challenge the constitutionality of the police action in stopping the automobile in which they *151were riding; nor do they complain of being made to get out of the vehicle. Rather, petitioners assert that their constitutionally protected interest in privacy was violated when the police, after stopping the automobile and making them get out, searched the vehicle’s interior, where they discovered a sawed-off rifle under the front seat and rifle shells in the locked glove compartment. The question before the Court, therefore, is a narrow one: Did the search of their friend’s automobile after they had left it violate any Fourth Amendment right of the petitioners?
The dissenting opinion urges the Court to answer this question by considering only the talisman of legitimate presence on the premises.' To be sure, one of the two alternative reasons given by the Court for its ruling in Jones v. United States, 362 U. S. 257 (1960), was that the defendant had been legitimately on the premises searched. Since Jones, however, the view that mere legitimate presence is enough to create a Fourth Amendment right has been questioned. See ante, at 147 n. 14. There also has been a signal absence of uniformity in the application of this theory. See ante, at 145-146 n. 13.
This Court’s decisions since Jones have emphasized a sounder standard for determining the scope of a person’s Fourth Amendment rights: Only legitimate expectations of privacy are protected by the Constitution. In Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), the Court rejected the notion that the Fourth Amendment protects places or property, ruling that the scope of the Amendment must be determined by the scope of privacy that a free people legitimately may expect. See id., at 353. As Mr. Justice Harlan pointed out in his concurrence, however, it is not enough that an individual desired or anticipated that he would be free from governmental intrusion. Rather, for an expectation to deserve the protection of the Fourth Amendment, it must “be one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’ ” See id., at 361.
*152The ultimate question, therefore, is whether one's claim to privacy from government intrusion is reasonable in light of all the surrounding circumstances. As the dissenting opinion states, this standard “will not provide law enforcement officials with a bright line between the protected and the unprotected.” See post, at 168. Whatever the application of this standard may lack in ready administration, it is more faithful to the purposes of the Fourth Amendment than a test focusing solely or primarily on whether the defendant was legitimately present during the search.1
In considering the reasonableness of asserted privacy expectations, the Court has recognized that no single factor invariably will be determinative. Thus, the Court has examined whether a person invoking the protection of the Fourth Amendment took normal precautions to maintain his privacy — that is, precautions customarily taken by those seeking privacy. See, e. g., United States v. Chadwick, 433 U. S. 1, 11 (1977) (“By placing personal effects inside a double-*153locked footlocker, respondents .manifested an expectation that the contents would remain free from public examination”); Katz v. United States, supra, at 352 (“One who occupies [a telephone booth], shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world”). Similarly, the Court has looked to the way a person has used a location, to determine whether the Fourth Amendment should protect his expectations of privacy. In Jones v. United States, supra, for example, the Court found that the defendant had a Fourth Amendment privacy interest in an apartment in which he had slept and in which he kept his clothing. The Court on occasion also has looked to history to discern whether certain types of government intrusion were perceived to be objectionable by the Framers of the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Chadwick, supra, at 7-9. And, as the Court states today, property rights reflect society’s explicit recognition of a person’s authority to act as he wishes in certain areas, and therefore should be considered in determining whether an individual’s expectations of privacy are reasonable. See Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165 (1969).
The Court correctly points out that petitioners cannot invoke decisions such as Alderman in support of their Fourth Amendment claim, as they had no property interest in the automobile in which they were riding. But this determination is only part of the inquiry required under Katz. The petitioners’ Fourth Amendment rights were not abridged here because none of the factors relied upon by this Court on prior occasions supports petitioners’ claim that their alleged expectation of privacy from government intrusion was reasonable.
We are concerned here with an automobile search. Nothing is better established in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence than the distinction between one’s expectation of privacy in *154an automobile and one’s expectation when in other locations.2 We have repeatedly recognized that this expectation in “an automobile . . . [is] significantly different from the traditional expectation of privacy and freedom in one’s residence.” United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U. S. 543, 561 (1976). In United States v. Chadwick, supra, at 12, the distinction was stated more broadly:
“[T]his Court has recognized significant differences between motor vehicles and other property which permit warrantless searches of automobiles in circumstances in which warrantless searches would not be reasonable in other contexts. Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132 (1925); Preston v. United States, [376 U. S. 364,] 366-367 [(1964)]; Chambers v. Maroney, 399 U. S. 42 (1970). See also South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U. S. 364, 367 (1976).” 3
In Chadwick, the Court recognized a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to one’s locked footlocker, and rejected the Government’s argument that luggage always should be equated with motor vehicles for Fourth Amendment purposes. 433 U. S., at 13.
A distinction also properly may be made in some circumstances between the Fourth Amendment rights of passengers and the rights of an individual who has exclusive control of an automobile or of its locked compartments. In South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U. S. 364 (1976), for example, we *155considered “the citizen’s interest in the privacy of the contents of his automobile” where its doors were locked and windows rolled up. See id., at 379 (Powell J., concurring). Here there were three passengers and a driver in the automobile searched. None of the passengers is said to have had control of the vehicle or the keys. It is unrealistic — as the shared experience of us all bears witness — to suggest that these passengers had any reasonable expectation that the car in which they had been riding would not be searched after they were lawfully stopped and made to get out. The minimal privacy that existed simply is not comparable to that, for example, of an individual in his place of abode, see Jones v. United States, supra; of one who secludes himself in a telephone booth, Katz v. United States, supra; or of the traveler who secures his belongings in a locked suitcase or footlocker. See United States v. Chadwick, supra.4
This is not an area of the law in which any “bright line” rule would safeguard both Fourth Amendment rights and the *156public interest in a fair and effective criminal justice system. The range of variables in the fact situations of search and seizure is almost infinite. Rather than seek facile solutions, it is best to apply principles broadly faithful to Fourth Amendment purposes. I believe the Court has identified these principles.5

 Allowing anyone who is legitimately on the premises searched to invoke the exclusionary rule extends the rule far beyond the proper scope of Fourth Amendment protections, as not all who are legitimately present invariably have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And, as the Court points out, the dissenters’ standard lacks even the advantage of easy application. See ante, at 145-146.
I do not share the dissenters’ concern that the Court’s ruling will “invit[e] police to engage in patently unreasonable searches every time an automobile contains more than one occupant.” See post, at 168. A police officer observing an automobile carrying several passengers will not know the circumstances surrounding each occupant’s presence in the automobile, and certainly will not know whether an occupant will be able to establish that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Thus, there will continue to be a significant incentive for the police to comply with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, lest otherwise valid prosecutions be voided. Moreover, any marginal diminution in this incentive that might result from the Court’s decision today is more than justified by society’s interest in restricting the scope of the exclusionary rule to those cases where in fact there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.

 There are sound reasons for this distinction: Automobiles operate on public streets; they are serviced in public places; they stop frequently; they are usually parked in public places; their interiors are highly visible; and they are subject to extensive regulation and inspection. The rationale of the automobile distinction does not apply, of course, to objects on the person of an occupant.

 Six Members of the Court joined The Chief Justice in Chadwick, and the two Justices who dissented in Chadwick did not disagree with the automobile distinction.

 The sawed-off rifle in this case was merely pushed beneath the front seat, presumably by one of the petitioners. In that position, it could have slipped into full or partial view in the event of an accident, or indeed upon any sudden stop. As the rifle shells were in the locked glove compartment, this might have presented a closer case if it had been shown that one of the petitioners possessed the keys or if a rifle had not been found in the automobile.
The dissenting opinion suggests that the petitioners here took the same actions to preserve their privacy as did the defendant in Katz: Just as Katz closed the door to the telephone booth after him, petitioners closed the doors to their^automobile. See post, at 165 n. 15. Last Term, this Court determined in Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U. S. 106 (1977), that passengers in automobiles have no Fourth Amendment right not to be ordered from their vehicle, once a proper stop is made. The dissenting opinion concedes that there is no question here of the propriety of the stopping of the automobile in which the petitioners were riding. See post, at 160 n. 5. Thus, the closing of the doors of a vehicle, even if there were only one occupant, cannot have the same significance as it might in other contexts.

 Even if one agreed with my dissenting Brethren that there was a Fourth Amendment violation in this case, the evidence seized would have been admissible under the modification of the exclusionary rule proposed by Mr. Justice White in his dissenting opinion in Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465, 538 (1976):
“[T]he rule should be substantially modified so as to prevent its application in those many circumstances where the evidence at issue was seized by an officer acting in the good-faith belief that his conduct comported with existing law and having reasonable grounds for this belief. These are recurring situations; and recurringly evidence is excluded without any realistic expectation that its exclusion will contribute in the slightest to the purposes of the rule, even though the trial will be seriously affected or the indictment dismissed.”
See also Brown v. Illinois, 422 U. S. 590, 609-610 (1975) (Powell, J., concurring in part).