Court Opinion

ID: 9463819
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:17:13.64933+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:18.119644
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent from Part IV of the court’s opinion, that which discusses inventory searches, and from the result.
The standard attack on an inventory search is to contend it was a pretext. No such contention being made here,1 to attain its result the court has been driven to write matter which must be taken as applying at large to such searches. In the process, I fear important legal principles have been disturbed.
The court obtains its result by declaring that such searches may not be “sweeping” or “unbounded,” a declaration which it claims to found on Mr. Justice Powell’s concurrence in South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 96 S.Ct. 3092, 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976). Next, without stating what the limits of such searches are to be, it holds that this search transgressed them. But the passage from the Justice’s concurrence on which'the court founds its opinion does not, when read as written, say what the court believes it says. Hence, the court’s conclusions, being founded on a fallacy, are themselves inevitably fallacious.
I do not think this search was unreasonable, and this, as I shall later demonstrate, is the test of Opperman — not some mechanical notion that cursory inventory searches are tolerable while thorough ones are not. As the court notes, the police had seen Edwards make a suspicious move toward the floor of the car. Their attention attracted to that area, the police lifted a “carpet flap” and found the stolen checks. The opinion’s characterization of this action as “ripping an automobile apart” seems to me to put the thing a little high; I must suppose the carpet was loose in the first place or Edwards would not have been able to put the checks under it, as the jury found he did. Nor can I follow the' opinion’s observation that the cache was “hardly a likely place for valuables,” since valuables— the checks — were found there and since it is *1340the common experience of mankind that people hide all manner of things, from car keys to floor sweepings, under carpet edges.
Nor is the teaching of Opperman what the majority declares: that inventory searches must be cursory and, insofar as they are thorough, just so far they are invalid. Instead, as the Opperman opinion repeatedly, but for today vainly, states, they are to be reasonable under the circumstances.2 Indeed the Supreme Court has more than once done its best to indicate that some circumstances may justify very thorough searches indeed: only four years ago, for example, in Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 93 S.Ct. 2523, 37 L.Ed.2d 706 (1973), matter was held properly admitted in evidence that was found in an automobile’s locked trunk. Under Dombrowski and Opperman, then, the court’s result in this particular case is wrong; and that is serious enough.
But what is vastly more serious, the court profoundly misreads the Opperman concurrence of Mr. Justice Powell. To begin with, even were the court correct in that reading, it is strange practice to seize upon passages from such a writing — a mere expression of additional views by one who begins by stating that he joins in the Court’s opinion3 —and found a decision upon them. But let this pass. The real vice in the majority opinion is that it first misunderstands and then misquotes even the small passage which it fixes upon. For the phrases quoted from Mr. Justice Powell’s concurring opinion do not bear the sense which the majority seeks to place upon them — the sense of setting limits to the thoroughness of an inventory search. Except in one marginally material aspect, they do not even concern such matters.
Instead, as the passage quoted makes plain — when the majority’s elisions are restored — the Justice writes to contrast “unrestrained” automobile searches in general circumstances with searches carried out in the inventory circumstance, and to indicate as well that the power to inventory does not extend to a general examination of the contents of letters, checkbooks, etc., which are found in its course.4 But by telescoping the language in which these two notions are expressed, the court makes it appear to address the thoroughness of the search, a matter with which it is scarcely concerned at all. I give the passage in full, with the majority’s quotes italicized and with explanatory footnote 7 appended:
Although the expectation of privacy in an automobile is significantly less than the traditional expectation of privacy associated with the home, [citations omitted], the unrestrained search of an automobile and its contents would constitute a serious intrusion upon the privacy of the individual in many circumstances. But such a search is not at issue in this case. As the Court’s opinion emphasizes, the search here was limited to an inventory of the unoccupied automobile and was conducted strictly in accord with the regulations of the Vermillion Police Department. Upholding searches of this type provides no general license for the police to examine all the contents of such automobiles.7
428 U.S. at 379, 96 S.Ct. at 3101-02, 49 L.Ed.2d at 1011.
*1341Since the majority’s collage of Mr. Justice Powell’s concurrence is the basis of its conclusion that this search was invalid, I can on no account concur in what the majority says or does here. Doubtless there are limits to the proper scope of inventory searches, limits to be developed when proper cases are presented. Had the Edwards car been “ripped apart,” for example, in fact rather than in hyperbole, grave questions would have been presented. It was not; they are. not; and the majority — in its zeal to perform what it seems to regard' as emergency damage control on an opinion by a court superior to ours — has been driven to such innocent but most unfortunate expedients as its opinion evidences. Viewing this as no part of our office, I regretfully dissent.

. Though I, for one, would have regarded the circumstances under which this search was conducted as dubious.

. The point is made, remade, and buttressed by quotations from three different cases at 428 U.S. 371-373, 96 S.Ct. 3098-9, 49 L.Ed.2d 1006-1008.

. 428 U.S., at 376, 96 S.Ct., at 3100, 49 L.Ed.2d, at 1009.

 As part of their inventory search the police may discover materials such as letters or checkbooks that “touch upon intimate areas in an individual’s personal affairs,” and “reveal much about a person’s activities, associations, and beliefs.” California Bankers Assn. v. Shultz, 416 U.S. 21, 78, 94 S.Ct. 1494, 1525, 39 L.Ed.2d 812 (1974) (Powell, J., concurring). See also Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 401 n. 7, 96 S.Ct. 1569, 1576, 48 L.Ed.2d 39 (1976). In this case the police found, inter alia, “miscellaneous papers,” a checkbook, an installment loan book, and a social security status card. App. 77. There is, however, no evidence in the record that in carrying out their established inventory duties the Vermillion police do other than search for and remove for storage such property without examining its contents.

. Even these, however, necessarily can be glanced at sufficiently to be identified, otherwise there is no inventory.