Court Opinion

ID: 9741441
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:55:42.949779+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:24.069628
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE APPLETON, dissenting: I dissent from the affirmance of the trial court’s refusal to suppress the evidence gathered by the arresting officers. I do so primarily to state my disagreement with the precedents relied upon by the majority. As the court stated in the beginning of its analysis in People v. Bailey, 159 Ill. 2d 498, 503, 639 N.E.2d 1278, 1280 (1994), “[t]he controlling legal principles are quite settled. The fourth amendment to the United States Constitution does not prohibit all State-initiated searches and seizures; it prohibits only those that are unreasonable.” The opinion then cites Chimel for the proposition with which I agree: “It is reasonable for police to search [an] arrestee for weapons that the arrestee could use to resist arrest or escape, or for evidence that the arrestee could conceal or destroy. The search is restricted to the person of the arrestee and any area into which the arrestee can reach.” Bailey, 159 Ill. 2d at 503, 639 N.E.2d at 1280, citing Chimel, 395 U.S. at 762-63, 23 L. Ed. 2d at 694, 89 S. Ct. at 2040. Our supreme court in Bailey, however, then went further, using the rationale of the United States Supreme Court in Belton. There, a “bright-line” rule was established: “[W]hen a policeman has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, he may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of that automobile.” Belton, 453 U.S. at 460, 69 L. Ed. 2d at 775, 101 S. Ct. at 2864. The court in Bailey then applied Belton to hold as follows: “Although a search incident to arrest is based on the need to disarm and discover evidence, the authority to search does not depend on the probability in a particular case that weapons would in fact be found or evidence would in fact be destroyed.” Bailey, 159 Ill. 2d at 504, 639 N.E.2d at 1281. The difficulty with a bright-line rule, despite the questionable foundations for such an approach in constitutional jurisprudence, is that rather than illuminating a constitutional principle, it is used like a laser to carve out greater and greater exceptions to the existence of personal liberty upon which the framers rested the construction and philosophical underpinnings of our government. This case is a classical example of the fallacy of such an approach. Here, defendant was outside of his car, with the doors locked, when he was arrested by the police. While the police had followed him, they had no opportunity to stop him in his vehicle. To extend the rationale of Belton, Bailey, and Allibalogun to such circumstances completely contradicts the underlying rationale for such searches as explained by the Supreme Court in Chimel. The logic employed fails to cross the chasm between the acknowledged need for officer safety and a vehicle search. Under such an extension, a defendant standing outside his house at the time of his arrest could have his home searched incident to the arrest without a warrant, not based on any existing case authority but rather on the theoretical underpinning of this decision and the precedents upon which it relies.