Searching Cars

Court gives police more power

The trouble started back in Prohibition. Two bootleggers were stopped in their car by federal agents, who ripped out the rumble-seat upholstery and found 68 bottles of gin and whisky. The officers had obtained no warrant allowing the search, but in a 1925 decision, the Supreme Court declared that because cars were mobile, warrantless searches were legal if police had probable cause to believe that contraband was in the vehicle. Ever since, court majorities have been swerving from side to side, trying to define the extent of that exception to the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure rules. In the process, the court has confounded not only police but judges and law professors as well. Last week the Justices swerved again, but they may have cleared up much of the murkiness; they also gave police much greater power. By a 6-to-3 vote, the court ruled that officers without warrants may search anywhere in a car and may open almost any container from paper bag to locked baggage.

The new case involved Albert Ross, who was arrested in Washington, B.C., after an informant tipped police that Ross was selling narcotics kept in his car's trunk. A search of the trunk turned up a small brown paper bag. Inside, the police found heroin--evidence instrumental in Ross's conviction. An appeals court reversed that conviction, and last July the Supreme Court arrived at the same conclusion in a similar case. The Justices had said then that police could not constitutionally undo the opaque plastic wrapped around two bricks of marijuana stashed in the trunk of a California man's car.

But the majority in the case was fractionated, and the author of the prevailing opinion, Potter Stewart, has since retired. Now a new majority, including his replacement, Sandra Day O'Connor, has decided that the Justices erred last July. Since a warrantless auto search (with probable cause) is as legal as a regular search with a warrant, then the same guidelines apply, reasoned Justice John Paul Stevens in last week's decision. "When a legitimate search is under way, and when its purpose and its limits have been precisely defined, nice distinctions between . . . glove compartments, upholstered seats, trunks and wrapped packages . . . must give way to the interest in the prompt and efficient completion of the task at hand."

Stevens noted, however, that limits do remain; for example, "probable cause to believe that undocumented aliens are being transported in a van will not justify a warrantless search of a suitcase." Unless, perhaps, it is a very large suitcase.

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