Court Opinion

ID: 9426914
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:15.768464+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:03.740992
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
concurring.
I fully join The Chief Justice’s thorough opinion for the Court. I write only to comment upon two points made by my Brother Blackmun’s dissent.
First, I agree wholeheartedly with my Brother Blackmun that it is “unfortunate” that the Government in this case “sought ... to vindicate an extreme view of the Fourth Amendment.” Post, at 17. It is unfortunate, in my view, not because this argument somehow “distract [ed]” the Court from other more meritorious arguments made by the Government — these arguments are addressed and convincingly rejected in the Court’s opinion — but because it is deeply distressing that the Department of Justice, whose mission is to protect the constitutional liberties of the people of the United States, should even appear to be seeking to subvert them by extreme and dubious legal arguments. It is gratifying that the Court today unanimously rejects the Government’s position.
Second, it should be noted that while Part II of the dissent suggests a number of possible alternative courses of action that the agents could have followed without violating the Constitution, no decision of this Court is cited to support the constitutionality of these courses, but only some decisions of Courts of Appeals. Post, at 23, nn. 4 and 5. In my view, it is not at all obvious that the agents could *17legally have searched the footlocker had they seized it after Machado and Leary had driven away with it in their car1 or “at the time and place of the arrests.” 2

 While the contents of the car could have been searched pursuant to the automobile exception, it is by no means clear that the contents of locked containers found inside a car are subject to search under this exception, any more than they would be if the police found them in any other place.

 When Machado and Leary were “standing next to [the] open automobile trunk containing the footlocker,” and even when they “were seated on it,” post, at 23, it is not obvious to me that the contents of the heavy, securely locked footlocker were within the area of their “immediate control” for purposes of the search-incident-to-arrest doctrine, the justification for which is the possibility that the arrested person might have immediate access to weapons that might endanger the officer’s safety or assist in his escape, or to items of evidence that he might conceal or destroy. I would think that the footlocker in this case hardly was “ ‘within [respondents’] immediate control’ — construing that phrase to mean the area from within which [they] might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence.” Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752, 763 (1969).