Court Opinion

ID: 9670962
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:28:57.08229+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:07.455778
License: Public Domain

FOSHEIM, Chief Justice
(concurring in the result).
I agree with the result reached by the majority, but not totally with their rationale. According to the majority, Belton holds that the question of an arrestee’s accessibility to the area searched is no longer relevant. This, from my reading, is an over-extended interpretation. The holding in Belton is preceded by the observation “that articles inside the relatively narrow compass of the passenger compartment of an automobile are in fact generally, even if not inevitably, within ‘the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary item.’ Chimel, 395 U.S., at 763 [89 S.Ct. at 2040].”1 Belton, 453 U.S., at 460, 101 S.Ct. at 2864 (emphasis added). Belton then states:
[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.
It follows from this conclusion that the police may also examine the contents of any containers found within the passenger compartment, for if the passenger compartment is within reach of the arres-tee, so also will containers in it be within his reach, (footnotes omitted, emphasis added)
Belton indicates accessibility is necessary and I believe the arrestee in the case before us was as accessible to the passenger compartment of the car as were the arrestees in Belton. It appears from a fair reading of the testimony that there was likely some time interval between the arrest and the handcuffing of Mr. Bjerke. During this interval he was certainly accessible to the car and, depending upon how he was handcuffed, he could have had access to the vehicle even while handcuffed.

. “Specifically, the Court held in Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 [89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685], that a lawful custodial arrest creates a situation which justifies the contemporaneous search without a warrant of the person arrested and of the immediately surrounding area. Such searches have long been considered valid because of the need ‘to remove any weapons that [the arrestee] might seek to use in order to resist arrest or effect his escape’ and the need to prevent the concealment or destruction of evidence. The Court’s opinion in Chimel emphasized the principle that, as the Court had said in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 19 [88 S.Ct. 1868, 1878, 20 L.Ed.2d 889], ‘[t]he scope of [a] search must be “strictly tied to and justified by” the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible.’ ” Belton, 453 U.S., at 457, 101 S.Ct. at 2862.