Court Opinion

ID: 9677228
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:46:42.864981+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:54.575583
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Judge,
concurring.
I agree that the second ground of error should be overruled, but I think that adopting the Fifth Circuit’s peculiar rule is unwise and unnecessary.
When an officer opens the door or the hood of a vehicle to find identifying numbers, he is searching. See Maldonado v. State, 528 S.W.2d 234, 241 (Tex.Cr.App.1975). (“The scope of such a search might reasonably have been expected to include examination of all identification numbers ....”) See also Hudson v. State, 588 S.W.2d 348, 352 (Tex.Cr.App.1979) (opening the door to photograph interior was a search). The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be secure in their effects — including automobiles — against unreasonable searches. South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 96 S.Ct. 3092, 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976). The Fifth Circuit’s holding that these “inspections” are not *743searches (or, alternatively, that they are searches which are always reasonable) is unsound. W. LaFave, 1 Search & Seizure 359-361 (1978). If the court adheres to this rule, the people of Texas will have no constitutionally protected right of privacy in their vehicles; officers will be able to open them for no reason at all, and this court will hold that they were not searched. It is an unsound doctrine, and one that is strange for coming so soon after the holding that “the expression, ‘inventory search,’ is not a talisman in whose presence the Fourth Amendment .. . fades away and disappears.” Gill v. State, 625 S.W.2d 307, 318-319 (Tex.Cr.App.1981) (Teague, J.). Evidently, the expression, “VIN inspection,” is such a talisman.
The rule is doubly strange in this case, for it is a dictum which is unnecessary to the result. The search can be uphéld in three other ways that comport with Fourth Amendment doctrine, and Judge Teague’s opinion says as much.
One way would be to hold that the officers had probable cause to search the vehicles and that exigencies excused them from the warrant requirement. Without opening doors or hood, the officers knew that two vehicles bore license plates that were not issued to them, that one of them had a broken vent window, that the Oldsmobile’s inspection sticker bore a different VIN than the one visible on the dash, and that the vehicles reportedly belonged to a person who operated a nearby wrecking yard. This would have given them probable cause to believe that the vehicles were stolen, and the mobility of the vehicles would have excused them from the warrant requirement.
A second justification for the searches would be to hold that the officers’ observations gave them less than probable cause, but a basis for suspicion that made it objectively reasonable (under the Terry* standard) to have searched for the VIN. W. LaFave, 1 Search & Seizure 361 (1978).
A third justification for the searches might appear if the court were to examine whether Martines and Garcia could, and did, consent to the searches. This might be a close and difficult question, but it would be better to take up such a question than to expediently abolish every Texan’s right to be protected from unreasonable searches of his vehicle.

 Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968).