Down here in Dixie, we sometimes wonder if the judges know about the 4th Amendment (you know, the one about the police have to have a warrant to search your stuff). Usually, round here, if the cops stop you, they can do whatever they want in the way of search because no judge (at least in Covington County) is ever going to throw out wrongfully seized evidence.
Hopefully we can get our judges to look at Arizona v. Gant which holds that the so-called “automobile exception” is a thing of the past. From the Supremes:
. . . 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.” Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 357 (1967) (footnote omitted). Among the exceptions to the warrant requirement is a search incident to a lawful arrest. See Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383, 392 (1914). The exception derives from interests in officer safety and evidence preservation that are typically implicated in arrest situations. See United States v. Robinson, 414 U. S. 218, 230–234 (1973); Chimel, 395 U. S., at 763.
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Despite the textual and evidentiary support for the Arizona Supreme Court’s reading of Belton, our opinion has been widely understood to allow a vehicle search incident to the arrest of a recent occupant even if there isno possibility the arrestee could gain access to the vehicle at the time of the search. This reading may be attributable to Justice Brennan’s dissent in Belton, in which he characterized the Court’s holding as resting on the “fiction. . . that the interior of a car is always within the immediate control of an arrestee who has recently been in the car.” 453 U. S., at 466.
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Under this broad reading of Belton, a vehicle search would be authorized incident to every arrest of a recent occupant notwithstanding that in most cases the vehicle’s passenger compartment will not be within the arrestee’s reach at the time of the search.
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Because police could not reasonably have believed either that Gant could have accessed his car at the time of the search or that evidence of the offense for which he was arrested might have been found therein, the search in this case was unreasonable.
