Court Opinion

ID: 9425659
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:21.458279+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:56.808086
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stewart,
with whom Mr. Justice Douglas, Mr. Justice Brennan, and Mr. Justice Marshall join, dissenting.
The Court says that the question before us “is whether the Fourth Amendment should be extended” to prohibit the warrantless seizure of Edwards’ clothing. I think, on the contrary, that the real question in this case is whether the Fourth Amendment is to be ignored. For in my view the judgment of the Court of Appeals can be reversed only by disregarding established Fourth Amendment principles firmly embodied in many previous decisions of this Court.
As the Court has repeatedly emphasized in the past, “the most basic constitutional rule in this area is that 'searches 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.’ ” Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 454-455; Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 357. Since it is conceded here that the seizure of Edwards’ clothing was not made pursuant to a warrant, the question becomes whether the Government has met its burden of showing that the circumstances of this seizure brought it within one of the “jealously and carefully drawn”1 exceptions to the warrant requirement.
*810The Court finds a warrant unnecessary in this case because of the custodial arrest of the respondent. It is, of course, well settled that the Fourth Amendment permits a warrantless search or seizure incident to a constitutionally valid custodial arrest. United States v. Robinson, 414 U. S. 218; Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752. But the mere fact of an arrest does not allow the police to engage in warrantless searches of unlimited geographic or temporal scope. Rather, the search must be spatially limited to the person of the arrestee and the area within his reach, Chimel v. California, supra, and must, as to time, be “substantially contemporaneous with the arrest,” Stoner v. California, 376 U. S. 483, 486; Preston v. United States, 376 U. S. 364, 367-368.
Under the facts of this case, I am unable to agree with the Court’s holding that the search was “incident” to Edwards’ custodial arrest. The search here occurred fully 10 hours after he was arrested, at a time when the administrative processing and mechanics of arrest had long since come to an end. His clothes were not seized as part of an “inventory” of a prisoner’s effects, nor were they taken pursuant to a routine exchange of civilian clothes for jail garb.2 And the considerations that typically justify a warrantless search incident to a lawful arrest were wholly absent here. As Mr. Justice *811Black stated for a unanimous Court in Preston v. United States, supra, at 367:
"The rule allowing contemporaneous searches is justified, for example, by the need to seize weapons and other things which might be used to assault an officer or effect an escape, as well as by the need to prevent the destruction of evidence of the crime — things which might easily happen where the weapon or evidence is on the accused’s person or under his immediate control. But these justifications are absent where a search is remote in time or place from the arrest.” 3
Accordingly, I see no justification for dispensing with the warrant requirement here. The police had ample time to seek a warrant, and no exigent circumstances were present to excuse their failure to do so. Unless the exceptions to the warrant requirement are to be “enthroned into the rule,” United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U. S. 56, 80 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting), this is precisely the sort of situation where the Fourth Amendment requires a magistrate’s prior approval for a search.
The Court says that the relevant question is “not whether it was reasonable to procure a search warrant, but whether the search itself was reasonable.” Ante, at 807. Precisely such a view, however, was explicitly rejected in Chimel v. California, supra, at 764-765, where the Court characterized the argument as “founded on little more than a subjective view regarding the acceptability of certain sorts of police conduct, and not on considerations relevant to Fourth Amendment interests.” As *812they were in Chimel, the words of Mr. Justice Frankfurter are again most relevant here:
“To say that the search must be reasonable is to require some criterion of reason. It is no guide at all either for a jury or for district judges or the police to say that an 'unreasonable search’ is forbidden — that the search must be reasonable. What is the test of reason which makes a search reasonable? The test is the reason underlying and expressed by the Fourth Amendment: the history and the experience which it embodies and the safeguards afforded by it against the evils to which it was a response. There must be a warrant to permit search, barring only inherent limitations upon that requirement when there is a good excuse for not getting a search warrant . . . .” United States v. Rabinowitz, supra, at 83 (dissenting opinion).
The intrusion here was hardly a shocking one, and it cannot be said that the police acted in bad faith. The Fourth Amendment, however, was not designed to apply only to situations where the intrusion is massive and the violation of privacy shockingly flagrant. Rather, as the Court’s classic admonition in Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 635, put the matter:
“It may be that it is the obnoxious thing in its mildest and least repulsive form; but illegitimate and unconstitutional practices get their first footing in that way, namely, by silent'approaches and slight deviations from legal modes of procedure. This can only be obviated by adhering to the rule that constitutional provisions for the security of person and property should be liberally construed. A close and literal construction deprives them of half their efficacy, and leads to gradual depreciation of the right, *813as if it consisted more in sound than in substance. It is the duty of courts to be watchful for the constitutional rights of the citizen, and against any stealthy encroachments thereon.”
Because I believe that the Court today unjustifiably departs from well-settled constitutional principles, I respectfully dissent.

 Jones v. United States, 357 U. S. 493, 499.

 The Government conceded at oral argument that the seizure of the respondent’s clothing was not a matter of routine jail procedure, but was undertaken solely for the purpose of searching for the incriminating paint chips.
No contention is made that the warrantless seizure of the clothes was necessitated by the exigencies of maintaining discipline or security within the jail system. There is thus no occasion to consider the legitimacy of warrantless searches or seizures in a penal institution based upon that quite different rationale.

 No claim is made that the police feared that Edwards either possessed a weapon or was planning to destroy the paint chips on his clothing. Indeed, the Government has not even suggested that he was aware of the presence of the paint chips on his clothing.