Court Opinion

ID: 9425475
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:50.915755+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:55.828546
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Powell,
concurring.*
Although I join the opinions of the Court, I write briefly to emphasize what seems to me to be the essential premise of our decisions.
The Fourth Amendment safeguards the right of “the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures . . . These are areas of an individual’s life about which he entertains legitimate expectations of privacy. I believe that an individual lawfully subjected to a custodial arrest retains no significant Fourth Amendment interest in the privacy of his person. Under this view the custodial arrest is the significant intrusion of state power into the privacy of one’s person. If the arrest is lawful, the privacy interest guarded by the Fourth Amendment is subordinated to a legitimate and overriding governmental concern. No reason then exists to frustrate law enforcement by requiring some independent justification for a search incident to a lawful custodial arrest. This seems to me the reason that a valid arrest justifies a full search of the person, even if that search is not narrowly limited by the twin rationales of seizing evidence and disarming the arrestee.1 The search incident to arrest *238is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment because the privacy interest protected by that constitutional guarantee is legitimately abated by the fact of arrest.2

This opinion also applies to No. 71-1669, Gustafson v. Florida, post, p. 260.

 The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit aptly stated this rationale in Charles v. United States, 278 F. 2d 386, 388-389 (1960): “Power over the body of the accused is the essence of his arrest; the two cannot be separated. To say that the police may curtail the liberty of the accused but refrain from impinging upon the sanctity of his pockets except for enumerated reasons is to *238ignore the custodial duties which devolve upon arresting authorities. Custody must of necessity be asserted initially over whatever the arrested party has in his possession at the time of apprehension. Once the body of the accused is validly subjected to the physical dominion of the law, inspections of his person, regardless of purpose, cannot be deemed unlawful, unless they violate the dictates of reason either because of their number or their manner of perpetration.” (Citation omitted.)

 In Gustafson, post, p. 260, the petitioner conceded the validity of the custodial arrest, although that conclusion was not as self-evident as in Robinson. Gustafson would have presented a different question if the petitioner could have proved that he was taken into custody only to afford a pretext for a search actually undertaken for collateral objectives. But no such question is before us.