April 23, 2008
The most significant decision handed down yesterday dealt with search and seizure issues.
The Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law.The unanimous decision comes in a case from Portsmouth, Va., where city detectives seized crack cocaine from a motorist after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense.
David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for police to issue a court summons and let the driver go.
Instead, city detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors say that drugs taken from him in a subsequent search can be used against him as evidence.
"We reaffirm against a novel challenge what we have signaled for half a century," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.
Scalia said that when officers have probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest and to search the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety.
Now this gets into the whole issue of whether actions taken in good faith by police, even when there was an error, violate the Constitution. After all, the search was standard procedure pursuant to an arrest, and it appears from my reading o this somewhat vague wire service report that the officers did not realize that an arrest under the circumstances was a violation of the standards set by the state. A string of cases dating back to the early 1980s made this result no surprise -- after all, police officers cannot be expected to be fortune tellers regarding future appeals court decisions.
And before our friends on the left start intoning the usual rhetoric about fascist police states, please notice that even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the ACLU's mouthpiece on the Supreme Court, ruled that there was no problem with the search.
Posted by: Greg at
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