Court Opinion

ID: 9427723
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:41.392767+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:19:54.206769
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Blackmuh join, dissenting.
On March 1, 1976, agents of the Illinois Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant in the Aurora Tap Tavern in Aurora, Ill. The warrant was based on information given by a confidential informant who said that he had seen heroin on the person of the bartender and in a drawer behind the bar on at least 10 occasions. Moreover, the informant advised the affiant that the bartender would have heroin for sale on March 1. The warrant empowered the police to search the Aurora Tap and the person of “Greg,” the bartender.
When police arrived at the Aurora Tap, a drab, dimly lit tavern, they found about a dozen or so persons standing or *99sitting at the bar. The police announced their purpose and told everyone at the bar to stand for a patdown search. Agent Jerome Johnson, the only officer to testify in the proceedings below, explained that the initial search was a frisk for weapons to protect the officers executing the warrant. Johnson frisked several patrons, including appellant Ybarra. During this patdown, Johnson felt “a cigarette pack with objects in it” in Ybarra’s front pants pocket. He finished frisking the other patrons and then returned to Ybarra. At that time, he frisked Ybarra once again, reached into Ybarra’s pocket, and removed the cigarette package that he had felt previously. The package, upon inspection, confirmed the officer’s previously aroused suspicion that it contained not cigarettes but packets of heroin.
Confronted with these facts, the Court concludes that the police were without authority under the warrant to search any of the patrons in the tavern and that, absent probable cause to believe that Ybarra possessed contraband, the search of his person violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Because I believe that this analysis is faulty, I dissent.
The first question posed by this case is the proper scope of a policeman’s power to search pursuant to a valid warrant. This Court has had very few opportunities to consider the scope of such searches. An early case, Marron v. United States, 275 U. S. 192 (1927), held that police could not seize one thing under a search warrant describing another thing. See also Steele v. United States, 267 U. S. 498 (1925) (warrant authorizing search of building used as a garage empowers police to search connecting rooms). Three other cases, Berger v. New York, 388 U. S. 41 (1967); United States v. Kahn, 415 U. S. 143 (1974); and United States v. Donovan, 429 U. S. 413 (1977), examined the scope of a warrant in the context of electronic surveillance. A number of cases involving warrantless searches have offered dicta on the subject of searches pursuant to a warrant. See, e. g., Bivens v. Six *100Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U. S. 388, 394, n. 7 (1971) (Fourth Amendment confines officer executing a warrant “strictly within the bounds set by the warrant”). Closest for our purposes, though concededly not dispositive, is United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 587 (1948), a case involving the warrantless search of an occupant of an automobile. In that case the Court suggested that police, “armed with a search warrant for a residence only,” could not search “all persons found” in the residence.
Faced with such a dearth of authority, it makes more sense than ever to begin with the language of the Fourth Amendment itself:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
As often noted, the Amendment consists of two independent clauses joined by the conjunction “and.” See, e. g., Go-Bart Co. v. United States, 282 U. S. 344, 356-357 (1931). The first clause forbids “unreasonable searches and seizures” of “persons, houses, papers, and effects. ...” The second clause, describes the circumstances under which a search warrant or arrest warrant may issue, requiring specification of the place to be searched as well as the persons or things to be seized.
Much of the modern debate over the meaning of the Fourth Amendment has focused on the relationship between the reasonableness requirement and the warrant requirement. In particular, the central question has been whether and under what circumstances the police are entitled to conduct “reasonable” searches without first securing a warrant. As this Court has summarized:
“Some have argued that a determination by a magistrate of probable cause as a precondition of any search or *101seizure is so essential that the Fourth Amendment is violated whenever the police might reasonably have obtained a warrant but failed to do so. Others have argued with equal force that a test of reasonableness, applied after the fact of search or seizure when the police attempt to introduce the fruits in evidence, affords ample safeguard for the rights in question, so that ‘[t]he relevant test is not whether it is reasonable to procure a search warrant, but whether the search was reasonable.’ ” Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 474 (1971), quoting United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U. S. 56, 66 (1950).
Mr. Justice Stewart explained the current accommodation of the two clauses in Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 357 (1967): “[S]earches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment—subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.” See also Schneckloth v. Bustamante, 412 U. S. 218, 219 (1973).
Here, however, we must look to the language of the Fourth Amendment to answer a wholly different question: whether and under what circumstances the police may search a person present at the place named in a warrant. In this regard, the second clause of the Amendment, by itself, offers no guidance. It is merely a set of standards that must be met before a search warrant or arrest warrant may “issue.” The restrictions on a policeman’s authority to search pursuant to a warrant derive, of course, from the first clause of the Amendment, which prohibits all “unreasonable” searches, whether those searches are pursuant to a warrant or not. See Go-Bart Co. v. United States, supra, at 357. Reading the two clauses together, we can infer that some searches or seizures are per se unreasonable: searches extending beyond the place specified, cf. Steele v. United States, supra, or seizures of *102persons or things other than those specified. Cf. Marron v. United States, 275 U. S. 192 (1927). No such presumption is available to Ybarra here, however, because the second clause of the Amendment does not require the warrant to specify the “persons” to be searched.1 As this Court has noted in the context of electronic surveillance, “ ' [t] he Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to describe only “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” not the persons from whom things will be seized.’ ” United States v. Kahn, 415 U. S., at 155, n. 15, quoting United States v. Fiorella, 468 F. 2d 688, 691 (CA2 1972).2
Nor, as a practical matter, could we require the police to specify in advance all persons that they were going to search at the time they execute the warrant. A search warrant is, by definition, an anticipatory authorization. The police must offer the magistrate sufficient information to confine the search but must leave themselves enough flexibility to react reasonably to whatever situation confronts them when they enter the premises. An absolute bar to searching persons not named in the warrant would often allow a person to frustrate the search simply by placing the contraband in his pocket. I cannot subscribe to any interpretation of the Fourth Amendment that would support such a result, and I doubt that this Court would sanction it if that precise fact situation were before it.
Recognizing that the authority to search premises must, under some circumstances, include the authority to search *103persons present on those premises,3 courts and legislatures have struggled to define the precise contours of that power. Some courts, for example, have required an indication that the person searched had a “connection” with the premises. See, e. g., Purkey v. Maby, 33 Idaho 281, 193 P. 79 (1920); State v. Massie, 95 W. Ya. 233, 120 S, E. 514 (1923). These courts do not explain, however, what form that connection must take or how it might manifest itself to the police. Some States have relied on the Uniform Arrest Act, which allows police executing a warrant to detain and question a suspicious person for up to two hours. See, e. g., State v. Wise, 284 A. 2d 292 (Del. Super. 1971). Proponents of this approach fail to explain, however, how detention for questioning will produce any hidden contraband. Moreover, in light of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that the warrant specify the person to be “seized,” it is at least arguable that this approach substitutes a greater constitutional intrusion for a lesser. Several other States, Illinois included, have simply passed over the constitutional question by identifying the permissible purposes for a search without specifying the circumstances under which that search can be conducted. Illinois’ provision, for example, permits an officer to search persons present on the named premises
“(a) To protect himself from attack, or
“(b) To prevent the disposal or concealment of any instruments, articles or things particularly described in the warrant.” Ill. Rev. Stat., ch. 38, § 108-9 (1975).
The generality of these attempts to define the proper limits of such searches does not mean, of course, that no limits exist. *104A person does not forfeit the protection of the Fourth Amendment merely because he happens to be present during the execution of a search warrant. To define those limits, however, this Court need look no further than the first clause of that Amendment and need ask no question other than whether, under all the circumstances, the actions of the police in executing the warrant were reasonable. Significantly, the concept of reasonableness in this context is different from the prevailing concept of reasonableness in the context of warrant-less searches. In that latter context, as noted earlier, there is a tension between giving full scope to the authority of police to make reasonable searches and the inferred requirement that the police secure a judicial approval in advance of a search. In the past we have resolved that tension by allowing “jealously and carefully drawn” exceptions to the warrant requirement. See Jones v. United States, 357 U. S. 493, 499 (1958); Katz v. United States, 389 U. S., at 357. The rationale for drawing these exceptions closely is obvious. Loosely drawn, they could swallow the warrant requirement itself.
In this case, however, the warrant requirement has been fully satisfied. As a result, in judging the reasonableness of the search pursuant to the warrant, we need not measure it against jealously drawn exceptions to that requirement. Only once before, to my knowledge, has this Court been relieved of concern for the warrant requirement to the extent that we could give full scope to the notion of reasonableness. In Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968), this Court considered the applicability of the Fourth Amendment to an on-the-street encounter between a policeman and three men who had aroused his suspicions. In upholding the ensuing “stop and frisk,” this Court found the warrant requirement completely inapposite because “on-the-spot” interactions between police and citizens “historically [have] not been, and as a practical matter could not be, subjected to the warrant procedure.” Id., at 20. The conduct in question had to be judged solely *105under “the Fourth Amendment’s general proscription against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ibid.
The petitioner in Terry had sought a “rigid all-or-nothing model of justification and regulation under the [Fourth] Amendment,” a model allowing the police to search some individuals completely and other individuals not at all. Such a model, however, would have overlooked “the utility of limitations upon the scope, as well as the initiation, of police actions as a means of constitutional regulation.” Id., at 17. This Court, therefore, opted for a flexible model balancing the scope of the intrusion against its justification:
“In order to assess the reasonableness of [the challenged search] as a general proposition, it is necessary 'first to focus upon the governmental interest which allegedly justifies official intrusion upon the constitutionally protected interests of the private citizen,’ for there is 'no ready test for determining reasonableness other than by balancing the need to search [or seize] against the invasion which the search [or seizure] entails.’ ” Id., at 20-21, quoting Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U. S. 523, 534-535, 536-537 (1967).
In the present case, Ybarra would have us eschew such flexibility in favor of a rule allowing the police to search only those persons on the premises for whom the police have probable cause to believe that they possess contraband. Presumably, such a belief would entitle the police to search those persons completely. But such a rule not only reintroduces the rigidity condemned in Terry, it also renders the existence of the search warrant irrelevant. Given probable cause to believe that a person possesses illegal drugs, the police need no warrant to conduct a full body search. They need only arrest that person and conduct the search incident to that arrest. See Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752, 763 (1969). It should not matter, of course, whether the arrest precedes the search or vice versa. See, e. g., United States v. Gorman, 355 *106F. 2d 151, 159 (CA2 1965), cert. denied, 384 U. S. 1024 (1966) ; Holt v. Simpson, 340 F. 2d 853, 856 (CA7 1965).
As already noted, I believe it error to analyze this case as if the police were under an obligation to act within one of the narrow exceptions to the warrant requirement, yet this is precisely what Ybarra would have us do. Whereas in Terry the warrant requirement was inapposite, here the warrant requirement has been fully satisfied. In either case we should give full scope to the reasonableness requirement of the first clause of the Fourth Amendment. Thus, in judging the reasonableness of a search pursuant to a warrant, which search extends to persons present on the named premises, this Court should consider the scope of the intrusion as well as its justification.
Viewed sequentially, the actions of the police in this case satisfy the scope/justification test of reasonableness established by the first clause of the Fourth Amendment as interpreted in Terry. The police entered the Aurora Tap pursuant to the warrant and found themselves confronting a dozen people, all standing or sitting at the bar, the suspected location of the contraband. Because the police were aware that heroin was being offered for sale in the tavern, it was quite reasonable to assume that any one or more of the persons at the bar could have been involved in drug trafficking. This assumption, by itself, might not have justified a full-scale search of all the individuals in the tavern. Nevertheless, the police also were quite conscious of the possibility that one or more of the patrons could be armed in preparation for just such an intrusion. In the narcotics business, “firearms are as much ‘tools of the trade’ as are most commonly recognized articles of narcotics paraphernalia.” United States v. Oates, 560 F. 2d 45, 62 (CA2 1977). The potential danger to the police executing the warrant and to innocent individuals in this dimly lit tavern cannot be minimized. By conducting an immediate frisk of those persons at the bar, the police elimi*107nated this danger and “froze” the area in preparation for the search of the premises.
Ybarra contends that Terry requires an “individualized” suspicion that a particular person is armed and dangerous. While this factor may be important in the case of an on-the-street stop, where the officer must articulate some reason for singling the person out of the general population, there are at least two reasons why it has less significance in the present situation, where execution of a valid warrant had thrust the police into a confrontation with a small, but potentially dangerous, group of people. First, in place of the requirement of “individualized suspicion” as a guard against arbitrary exercise of authority, we have here the determination of a neutral and detached magistrate that a search was necessary. As this Court noted in Fisher v. United States, 425 U. S. 39-1, 400 (1976), the Framers of the Fourth Amendment “struck a balance so that when the State’s reason to believe incriminating evidence will be found becomes sufficiently great, the invasion of privacy becomes justified and a warrant to search and seize will issue.” The question then becomes whether, given the initial decision to intrude, the scope of the intrusion is reasonable.
In addition, the task performed by the officers executing a search warrant is inherently more perilous than is a momentary encounter on the street. The danger is greater “not only because the suspect and officer will be in close proximity for a longer period of time, but also . . . because the officer’s investigative responsibilities under the warrant require him to direct his attention to the premises rather than the person.” W. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 4.9, pp. 150-151 (1978). To hold a police officer in such a situation to the same standard of “individualized suspicion” as might be required in the case of an on-the-street stop would defeat the purpose of gauging reasonableness in terms of all the circumstances surrounding an encounter.
*108Terry suggests an additional factor that courts must consider when confronting an allegedly illegal frisk for weapons. As this Court admitted in that case, “[t]he exclusionary rule has its limitations ... as a tool of judicial control.” 392 U. S., at 13. Premised as that rule is on the hypothesis that police will avoid illegal searches if threatened with exclusion of the fruits of such searches, “it is powerless to deter invasions of constitutionally guaranteed rights where the police either have no interest in prosecuting or are willing to forgo successful prosecution in the interest of serving some other goal.” Id., at 14. Where, as here, a preliminary frisk is based on an officer’s well-honed sense of self-preservation, I have little doubt that “the [exclusionary] rule is ineffective as a deterrent.” Id., at 13.
Measured against the purpose for the initial search is the scope of that search. I do not doubt that a patdown for weapons is a substantial intrusion into one’s privacy. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S., at 17, n. 13. Nevertheless, such an intrusion was more than justified, under the circumstances here, by the potential threat to the lives of the searching officers and innocent bystanders. In the rubric of Terry itself, a “man of reasonable caution” would have been warranted in the belief that it was appropriate to frisk the 12 or so persons in the vicinity of the bar for weapons. See id., at 21-22. Thus, the initial frisk of Ybarra was legitimate.
During this initial patdown, Officer Johnson felt something suspicious: a cigarette package with objects in it. The record below is not entirely clear as to the shape or texture of the objects, but it is clear that Officer Johnson had at least a subjective suspicion that the objects were packets of heroin like those described in the warrant. He testified, for example, that after patting down the other persons at the bar, he returned directly to Ybarra to search him “for controlled substances.” App. 49. At this point, he reached into Ybarra’s pants pocket, removed the cigarette package, and confirmed his suspicion.
*109While the test of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment is necessarily objective as opposed to subjective, see Terry v. Ohio, supra, at 21-22, Officer Johnson’s subjective suspicions help fill out his cryptic description of the “objects” that he felt in Ybarra’s pocket. The objects clearly did not feel like cigarettes.4 In this case we need not decide whether, as a general rule, an officer conducting an on-the-street frisk under Terry can carry his search into the pockets of a suspect to examine material that he suspects to be contraband. We are dealing here with a case where the police had obtained a warrant to search for precisely the item that Officer Johnson suspected was present in Ybarra’s pocket. Whether Officer Johnson’s level of certainty could be labeled “probable cause,” “reasonable suspicion,” or some indeterminate, intermediate level of cognition, the limited pursuit of his suspicions by extracting the item from Ybarra’s pocket was reasonable. The justification for the intrusion was linked closely .to the terms of the search warrant; the intrusion itself was carefully tailored to conform to its justification.
The courts below reached a similar conclusion. The trial court noted correctly that “[i]t might well not be reasonable to search 350 people on the first floor of Marshall Field, but we’re talking about, by description, a rather small tavern.” See App. 43. The question, as understood by the trial court, was the “reasonableness” of the intrusion under all the surrounding circumstances. Ibid. The Illinois Appellate Court agreed. In an earlier case, People v. Pugh, 69 Ill. App. 2d 312, 217 N. E. 2d 557 (1966), the Appellate Court had concluded that the police acted reasonably in searching the brother of the owner of the named premises during the exe-*110cutían of a search warrant for narcotics. According to the Appellate Court in that case, “[t]he United States Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches . . . ; the search of Raymond Pugh under the circumstances of this case cannot be so classified.” Id., at 316, 217 N. E. 2d, at 559. In this case, the Appellate Court relied expressly on the holding and reasoning in Pugh and found no constitutional violation in the searches of Ybarra. These findings should not be overturned lightly.
I would conclude that Officer Johnson, acting under the authority of a valid search warrant, did not exceed the reasonable scope of that warrant in locating and retrieving the heroin secreted in Ybarra’s pocket. This is not a case where Ybarra’s Fourth Amendment rights were at the mercy of overly zealous officers “engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.” Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 13-14 (1948). On the contrary, the need for a search was determined, as contemplated by the second clause of the Fourth Amendment, by a neutral and detached magistrate, and the officers performed their duties pursuant to their warrant in an appropriate fashion. The Fourth Amendment requires nothing more.

 Technically, the police must temporarily “seize” a person before they can search him. Such incidental seizures, however, never have been nor could be subjected to the warrant requirement. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, 20 (1968). See also infra, at 104-105.

 The failure of the Fourth Amendment to require specification of the persons to be searched does not, of course, prohibit such specification. Thus, in the present case, the warrant specifically authorized the police to search Greg, the bartender.

 As even a critic of the approach employed by the court below admitted, “a realistic appraisal of the situation facing the officer executing a search warrant compels the conclusion that under some circumstances a right to search occupants of the place named in the warrant is essential.” LaFave, Search and Seizure: “The Course of True Law . . . Has Not . . . Run Smooth,” 1966 Law Forum 255, 272.

 In fact, Officer Johnson did testify that the objects felt exactly like what they were: heroin. See App. 9 (“I felt some objects that I felt to be heroin”). See also id., at 50 (“I felt objects in his pocket which I believed — ”). In both cases defense counsel interposed objections to Officer Johnson’s characterization of the objects, which objections the trial court sustained.