THORNTON v. UNITED STATES
No. 03-5165
Supreme Court of the United States
May 24, 2024
541 U.S. 615
No. 03-5165. Argued March 31, 2004—Decided May 24, 2004
Gregory G. Garre argued the cause for the United States. With him on the brief were Solicitor General Olson, Assistant Attorney General Wray, and Deputy Solicitor General Dreeben.*
*A brief of amici curiae urging reversal was filed for the American Civil Liberties Union et al. by Tracey Maclin, Steven R. Shapiro, and Lisa Kemler.
A brief of amici curiae urging affirmance was filed for the State of Arizona et al. by Terry Goddard, Attorney General of Arizona, Mary R. O‘Grady, Solicitor General, Randall M. Howe, Chief Counsel, and Kathleen P. Sweeney and Eric J. Olsson, Assistant Attorneys General, and by the Attorneys General for their respective States as follows: William H. Pryor, Jr., of Alabama, M. Jаne Brady of Delaware, Charles J. Crist, Jr.,
Shashank S. Upadhye, pro se, filed a brief as amicus curiae.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court except as to footnote 4.
In New York v. Belton, 453 U. S. 454 (1981), we held that when a police officer has made a lawful custodial arrest of an occupant of an automobile, the Fourth Amendment allows the officer to seаrch the passenger compartment of that vehicle as a contemporaneous incident of arrest. We have granted certiorari twice before to determine whether Belton‘s rule is limited to situations where the officer makes contact with the occupant while the occupant is inside the vehicle, or whether it applies as well when the officer first makes contact with the arrestee after the latter has stepped out of his vehicle. We did not reach the merits in either of those two cases. Arizona v. Gant, 540 U. S. 963 (2003) (vacating and remanding for reconsideration in light of State v. Dean, 206 Ariz. 158, 76 P. 3d 429 (2003) (en banc)); Florida v. Thomas, 532 U. S. 774 (2001) (dismissing for lack of jurisdiction). We now reach that question and conclude that Belton governs even when an officer does not make contact until the person arrested has left the vehicle.
Officer Deion Nichols of the Norfolk, Virginia, Police Department, who was in uniform but driving an unmarked police car, first noticed petitioner Marcus Thornton when petitioner slowed down so as to avoid driving next to him. Nichols suspected that petitioner knew he was a police officer and for some reason did not want to pull next to him. His suspicions aroused, Nichols pulled off onto a side street
Petitioner appeared nervous. He began rambling and licking his lips; he was sweating. Concerned for his safety, Nichols asked petitioner if he had any narcotics or weapons on him or in his vehicle. Petitioner said no. Nichols then asked petitioner if he could pat him down, to which petitioner agreed. Nichols felt a bulge in petitioner‘s left front pocket and again asked him if he had any illegal narcotics on him. This time petitioner stated that he did, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out two individual bags, оne containing three bags of marijuana and the other containing a large amount of crack cocaine. Nichols handcuffed petitioner, informed him that he was under arrest, and placed him in the back seat of the patrol car. He then searched petitioner‘s vehicle and found a BryCo 9-millimeter handgun under the driver‘s seat.
A grand jury charged petitioner with possession with intent to distribute cocaine base,
Petitioner appealed, challenging only the District Court‘s denial of the suppression motion. He argued that Belton was limited to situations where the officer initiated contact with an arrestee while he was still an occupant of the car. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed. 325 F. 3d 189 (2003). It held that “the historical rationales for the search incident to arrest doctrine—‘the need to disarm the suspect in order to take him into custody’ and ‘the neеd to preserve evidence for later use at trial,‘” id., at 195 (quoting Knowles v. Iowa, 525 U. S. 113, 116 (1998)), did not require Belton to be limited solely to situations in which suspects were still in their vehicles when approached by the police. Noting that petitioner conceded that he was in “close proximity, both temporally and spatially,” to his vehicle, the court concluded that the car was within petitioner‘s immediate control, and thus Nichols’ search was reasonable under Belton.1 325 F. 3d, at 196. We granted certiorari, 540 U. S. 980 (2003), and now affirm.
In Belton, an officer overtook a speeding vehicle on the New York Thruway and ordered its driver to pull over. 453 U. S., at 455. Suspecting that the occupants possessed marijuana, the officer directed them to get out of the car and arrested them for unlawful possession. Id., at 454–455. He searched them and then searched the passenger compartment of the car. Id., at 455. We considered the constitutionally permissible scope of a search in these circumstances—and sought to lay down a workable rule governing that situation.
In so holding, we placed no reliance on the fact that the officer in Belton ordered the occupants out of the vehicle, or initiated contact with them while they remained within it. Nor do we find such a factor persuasive in distinguishing the current situation, as it bears no logical relationship to Belton‘s rationale. There is simply no basis to conclude that the span of the area generally within the arrestee‘s immediate control is determined by whether the arrestee exited the
In all relevant aspects, the arrest of a suspect who is next to a vehicle presents identical concerns regarding officer safety and the destruction of evidence as the arrest of one who is inside the vehicle. An officer may search a suspect‘s vehicle under Belton only if the suspect is arrested. See Knowles, supra, at 117–118. A custodial arrest is fluid and “[t]he danger to the police officer flows from the fаct of the arrest, and its attendant proximity, stress, and uncertainty,” Robinson, supra, at 234–235, and n. 5 (emphasis added). See Washington v. Chrisman, 455 U. S. 1, 7 (1982) (“Every arrest must be presumed to present a risk of danger to the arresting officer“). The stress is no less merely because the arrestee exited his car before the officer initiated contact, nor is an arrestee less likely to attempt to lunge for a weapon or to destroy evidence if he is outside of, but still in control of, the vehicle. In either case, the officer faces a highly volatile situation. It would make little sense to apply two different rules to what is, at bottom, the same situation.
In some circumstances it may be safer and more effective for officers to conceal their presence from a suspect until he has left his vehicle. Certainly that is a judgment officers should be free to make. But under the strictures of petitioner‘s proposed “contact initiation” rule, officers who do so would be unable to search the car‘s passenger compartment
Petitioner argues, however, that Belton will fail to provide a “bright-line” rule if it applies to more than vehicle “occupants.” Brief for Petitioner 29–34. But Belton allows police to search the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to a lawful custodial arrest of both “occupant[s]” and “recent occupant[s].” 453 U. S., at 460. Indeed, the respondent in Belton was not inside the car at the time of the arrеst and search; he was standing on the highway. In any event, while an arrestee‘s status as a “recent occupant” may turn on his temporal or spatial relationship to the car at the time of the arrest and search,2 it certainly does not turn on whether he was inside or outside the car at the moment that the officer first initiated contact with him.
To be sure, not all contraband in the passenger compartment is likely to be readily accessible to a “recent occupant.” It is unlikely in this case that petitioner could have reached under the driver‘s seat for his gun once he was outside of his automobile. But the firearm and the passenger compartment in general were no more inaccessible than were the contraband and the рassenger compartment in Belton. The
Rather than clarifying the constitutional limits of a Belton search, petitioner‘s “contact initiation” rule would obfuscate them. Under petitioner‘s proposed rule, an officer approaching a suspect who has just alighted from his vehicle would have to determine whether hе actually confronted or signaled confrontation with the suspect while he remained in the car, or whether the suspect exited his vehicle unaware of, and for reasons unrelated to, the officer‘s presence. This determination would be inherently subjective and highly fact specific, and would require precisely the sort of ad hoc determinations on the part of officers in the field and reviewing courts that Belton sought to avoid. Id., at 459–460. Experience has shown that such a rule is impracticable, and we refuse to adopt it. So long as an arrestee is the sort of “re-
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
JUSTICE O‘CONNOR, concurring in part.
I join all but footnote 4 of the Court‘s opinion. Although the oрinion is a logical extension of the holding of New York v. Belton, 453 U. S. 454 (1981), I write separately to express my dissatisfaction with the state of the law in this area. As JUSTICE SCALIA forcefully argues, post, at 627–629 (opinion concurring in judgment), lower court decisions seem now to treat the ability to search a vehicle incident to the arrest of a recent occupant as a police entitlement rather than as an exception justified by the twin rationales of Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752 (1969). That erosion is a direct consequence of Belton‘s shaky foundation. While the approach
JUSTICE SCALIA, with whom JUSTICE GINSBURG joins, concurring in the judgment.
In Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752, 762–763 (1969), we held that a search incident to arrest was justified only as a means to find weapons the аrrestee might use or evidence he might conceal or destroy. We accordingly limited such searches to the area within the suspect‘s “‘immediate control‘“—i. e., “the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m].” Id., at 763. In New York v. Belton, 453 U. S. 454, 460 (1981), we set forth a bright-line rule for arrests of automobile occupants, holding that, because the vehicle‘s entire passenger compartment is “in fact generally, even if not inevitably,” within the arrestee‘s immediate control, a search of the whole compartment is justified in every case.
When petitioner‘s car was searched in this case, he was neither in, nor anywhere near, the passenger compartment of his vehicle. Rather, he was handcuffed and secured in the back of the officer‘s squad car. The risk that he would nevertheless “grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m]” from his car was remote in the extreme. The Court‘s effort to apply our current doctrine to this search stretches it beyond its breaking point, and for that reason I cannot join the Court‘s opinion.
I
I see three reasons why the search in this case might have been justified to protect officer safety or prevent concealment or destruction of evidence. None ultimately persuades me.
The first is that, despite being handcuffed and secured in the back of a squad car, petitioner might have escaped and
Of course, the Government need not document specific instances in оrder to justify measures that avoid obvious risks. But the risk here is far from obvious, and in a context as frequently recurring as roadside arrests, the Government‘s inability to come up with even a single example of a handcuffed arrestee‘s retrieval of arms or evidence from his vehi-
The second defense of the search in this case is that, since the officer could have conducted the search at the time of arrest (when the suspect was still near the car), he should not be penalized for having taken the sensible precaution of securing the suspect in the squad car first. As one Court of Appeals put it: “‘[I]t does not make sense to prescribe a constitutional test that is entirely at odds with safe and sensible police procedures.‘” United States v. Mitchell, 82 F. 3d 146, 152 (CA7 1996) (quoting United States v. Karlin, 852 F. 2d 968, 971 (CA7 1988)); see also United States v. Wesley, 293 F. 3d 541, 548–549 (CADC 2002). The weakness of this argument is that it assumes that, one way or another, the search must take place. But conducting a Chimel search is not the Government‘s right; it is an exception—justified by necessity—to a rule that would otherwise render the search unlawful. If “sensible police procedures” require that suspects be handcuffed and put in squad cars, then police should handcuff suspects, put them in squad cars, and not conduct the seаrch. Indeed, if an officer leaves a suspect unrestrained nearby just to manufacture authority to search, one could argue that the search is unreasonable precisely because the dangerous conditions justifying it existed only by virtue of the officer‘s failure to follow sensible procedures.
The third defense of the search is that, even though the arrestee posed no risk here, Belton searches in general are reasonable, and the benefits of a bright-line rule justify upholding that small minority of searches that, on their particular facts, are not reasonable. The validity of this argument rests on the accuracy of Belton‘s claim that the passenger compartment is “in fact generally, even if not inevitably,” within the suspect‘s immediate control. 453 U. S., at 460.
The popularity of the practice is not hard to fathom. If Belton entitles an officer to search a vehicle upon arresting the driver dеspite having taken measures that eliminate any danger, what rational officer would not take those measures? Cf. Moskovitz, A Rule in Search of a Reason: An Empirical Reexamination of Chimel and Belton, 2002 Wis. L. Rev. 657, 665–666 (citing police training materials). If it was ever true that the passenger compartment is “in fact generally, even if not inevitably,” within the arrestee‘s immediate control at the time of the search, 453 U. S., at 460, it certainly is not true today. As one judge has put it: “[I]n our search for clarity, we have now abandoned our constitutional moorings and floated to a place where the law approves of purely exploratory searches of vehicles during which officers with no definite objective or reason for the search are allowed tо rummage around in a car to see what they might find.”
II
If Belton searches are justifiable, it is not because the arrestee might grab a weapon or evidentiary item from his car, but simply because the car might contain evidence relevant to the crime for which he was arrested. This more general sort of evidence-gathering search is not without antecedent. For example, in United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U. S. 56 (1950), we upheld a search of the suspect‘s place of business after he was arrested there. We did not restrict the officers’ search authority to “the area into which [the] arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m],” Chimel, 395 U. S., at 763, and we did not justify the search as a means to prevent concealmеnt or destruction of evidence.1 Rather, we relied on a more general interest in gathering evidence relevant to the crime for which the suspect had been arrested. See 339 U. S., at 60–64; see also Harris v. United States, 331 U. S. 145, 151–152 (1947); Marron v. United States, 275 U. S. 192, 199 (1927); Agnello v. United States, 269 U. S. 20, 30 (1925); cf. Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383, 392 (1914).
Numerous earlier authorities support this approach, referring to the general interest in gathering evidence related to the crime of arrest with no mention of the more specific interest in preventing its concealment or destruction. See United States v. Wilson, 163 F. 338, 340, 343 (CC SDNY 1908); Smith v. Jerome, 47 Misc. 22, 23–24, 93 N. Y. S. 202, 202–203 (Sup. Ct. 1905); Thornton v. State, 117 Wis. 338, 346–347, 93 N. W. 1107, 1110 (1903); Ex parte Hurn, 92 Ala. 102, 112, 9 So. 515, 519–520 (1891); Thatcher v. Weeks, 79 Me. 547,
“The officer who arrests a man on a criminal charge should consider the nature of the charge; and, if he finds about the prisoner‘s person, or otherwise in his possession, either goods or moneys which there is reason to believe are connected with the supposed crime as its fruits, or as the instruments with which it was committed, or as directly furnishing evidence relating to the transaction, he may take the same, and hold them to be disposed of as the court may direct.” Bishop, supra, § 211, at 127.
Only in the years leading up to Chimel did we start consistently referring to the narrower interest in frustrating concealment or destruction of evidence. See Sibron v. New York, 392 U. S. 40, 67 (1968); Preston v. United States, 376 U. S. 364, 367 (1964).
There is nothing irrational about broader police authority to search for evidence when and where the perpetrator of a crime is lawfully arrested. The fact of prior lawful arrest distinguishes the arrestee from society at large, and distinguishes a search for evidence of his crime from general rummaging. Moreover, it is not illogiсal to assume that evidence of a crime is most likely to be found where the suspect was apprehended.
Nevertheless, Chimel‘s narrower focus on concealment or destruction of evidence also has historical support. See Holker v. Hennessey, 141 Mo. 527, 539–540, 42 S. W. 1090,
In short, both Rabinowitz and Chimel are plausible accounts of what the Constitution requires, and neither is so persuasive as to justify departing from settled law. But if we are going to cоntinue to allow Belton searches on stare decisis grounds, we should at least be honest about why we are doing so. Belton cannot reasonably be explained as a mere application of Chimel. Rather, it is a return to the broader sort of search incident to arrest that we allowed before Chimel—limited, of course, to searches of motor vehicles, a category of “effects” which give rise to a reduced expectation of privacy, see Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U. S. 295, 303 (1999), and heightened law enforcement needs, see id., at 304; Rabinowitz, supra, at 73 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting).
Recasting Belton in these terms would have at least one important practical consequence. In United States v. Robinson, 414 U. S. 218, 235 (1973), we held that authority to search an arrestee‘s person does not depend on the actual
In this case, as in Belton, petitioner was lawfully arrested for a drug offense. It was reasonable for Officer Nichols to believe that further contraband or similar evidence relevant to the crime for which he had been arrested might be found in the vehicle from which he had just alighted and which was still within his vicinity at the time of arrest. I would affirm the decision below on that ground.3
JUSTICE STEVENS, with whom JUSTICE SOUTER joins, dissenting.
Prior to our decision in New York v. Belton, 453 U. S. 454 (1981), there was a widespread conflict among both federal аnd state courts over the question “whether, in the course of a search incident to the lawful custodial arrest of the occupants of an automobile, police may search inside the automobile after the arrestees are no longer in it.” Id., at 459. In answering that question, the Court expanded the authority of the police in two important respects. It allowed the police to conduct a broader search than our decision in Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752, 762–763 (1969), would have permitted,1 and it authorized them to open closed containers that might be found in the vehicle‘s passenger compartment.2
A fair reading of the Belton opinion itself, and of the conflicting cases that gave rise to our grant of certiorari, makes
The bright-line rule crafted in Belton is not needed for cases in which the arrestee is first accosted when he is a pedestrian, because Chimel itself provides all the guidance that is necessary. The only genuine justification for extending Belton to cover such circumstances is the interest in uncovering potentially valuable evidence. In my opinion, that goal must give way to the citizen‘s constitutionally protected interest in privacy when there is already in place a welldefined rule limiting the permissible scope of a search of an arrested pedestrian. The Chimel rule should provide the same protection to a “recent occupant” of a vehicle as to a recent occupant of a house.
Unwilling to confine the Belton rule to the narrow class of cases it was designed to address, the Court extends Belton‘s reach without supplying any guidance for the future application of its swollen rule. We are told that officers may search a vehicle incident to arrest “[s]o long as [the] arrestee is the sort of ‘recent occupant’ of a vehicle such as petitioner was here.” Ante, at 623–624. But we are not told how recent is recent, or how close is close, perhaps because in this case “the record is not clear.” 325 F. 3d 189, 196 (CA4 2003). As the Court cautioned in Belton itself, “[w]hen a person cannot know how a court will apply a settled principle to a recurring factual situation, that person cannot know the scope of his constitutional protection, nor can a policeman know the scope of his authority.” 453 U. S., at 459–460. Without some limiting principle, I fear that today‘s decision will contribute to “a massive broadening of the automobile exception,” Robbins, 453 U. S., at 452 (STEVENS, J., dissenting), when officers have probable cause to arrest an individual but not to search his car.
Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.