Scope of the Search

Scope of the Search

Once a lawful custodial arrest has been made, Chimel v. California authorizes a warrantless search of two places: the arrestee's person and the area within the arrestee's immediate control.¹ The Court defined that second phrase as the area from within which the arrestee might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence, and the area is often called the arrestee's wingspan for that reason.² The two places are usually mentioned in a single breath, yet they are justified in different ways, and keeping them apart prevents most errors on this topic. Everything outside them, including other rooms of a house and spaces the arrestee could not reach, returns to the ordinary rule that a warrant is required.

Chimel's own facts mark the outer edge. Officers arrived at the defendant's home with a warrant for his arrest on a coin-shop burglary charge but without a search warrant, arrested him there, and searched the whole three-bedroom house, including the attic, the garage, and a small workshop.³ The Court held the search unreasonable and the coins inadmissible, because nothing justified routinely searching any room other than the one where the arrest occurred.⁴ The arrest itself was lawful, and the officers did have authority to search something. The defect was that they searched far more than the two dangers behind the exception could account for, and a lawful arrest does not turn a home into a place that may be searched at will.

The two zones differ because the dangers attach to them differently. A person's body goes wherever the person goes, and anything hidden in clothing is in reach at every moment of the arrest, so the weapon and evidence risks are present in every case. For that reason the search of the person proceeds as a matter of course, without asking whether a particular arrestee seems likely to be armed. Surrounding space is another matter. A gun on a table beside the arrestee is as dangerous as one in a pocket, but a gun in a room the arrestee cannot get to endangers no one during the arrest, and evidence beyond reach cannot be destroyed by the arrestee. So the second zone extends only as far as the arrestee's actual ability to reach, and the first zone requires no showing about reach at all. The next two sections take the person first, because it is the simpler rule, and then the grab area, where the analysis depends on distance.

Search of the Person

A lawful custodial arrest authorizes the arresting officer to search the arrestee's person, and the officer does not have to show anything about this particular arrestee to do so. That rule comes from United States v. Robinson, the decision on which Riley v. California and New York v. Belton rely when they describe the search of the person.⁶ The officer in Robinson arrested a driver for driving with a revoked license, patted him down, felt an object in a coat pocket that he could not identify, and pulled out a crumpled cigarette package, which held 14 capsules of heroin.⁷ The court of appeals had found the search unreasonable on two grounds: a person arrested for a license offense is unlikely to carry evidence of that offense, and opening the package could not be justified as a search for weapons.⁸ The Supreme Court reversed, rejecting the view that courts must decide case by case “whether or not there was present one of the reasons supporting the authority for a search of the person incident to a lawful arrest.”⁹

The holding rests on what an arrest is. A custodial arrest on probable cause is itself a reasonable intrusion, and once that intrusion is lawful, “a search incident to the arrest requires no additional justification.”¹⁰ The authority therefore comes from the fact of the arrest, and the likelihood that this arrestee carries a weapon or evidence plays no part. That is why the search stood in Robinson even though the Court recognized no concern about the loss of evidence and the officer had no specific concern that the driver was armed.¹¹

Two reasons support a rule this categorical. The first concerns danger: the risk to an officer is far greater during the extended exposure that follows taking a suspect into custody and transporting him to the station, so the limited pat-down permitted on mere suspicion would be inadequate once an arrest is made.¹² The second concerns who decides, and when. If the validity of a pocket search depended on how likely the arrestee was to hold a weapon or evidence, every suppression hearing would reopen what the officer could have known in the first seconds of the arrest, and a court reviewing with hindsight could nearly always find the risk small. An officer facing that review would have to guess at the arrest scene how a judge would later rate the danger. Robinson therefore told trial courts not to second-guess the “quick ad hoc judgment” of arresting officers, and Belton later described the resulting rule as straightforward to apply and predictable to enforce.¹³

The rule reaches further than a weapons frisk because an arrest supports more than the protective purpose. A search incident to arrest is justified in part by the need to protect the officer from a concealed weapon, but it rests on other grounds as well, so it can involve a relatively extensive exploration of the person, while a search for weapons without probable cause to arrest must stay limited to what is necessary to find weapons.¹⁴ The rule also applies whatever the offense of arrest. Robinson's arrest was for a minor offense that left no evidence to find in a cigarette package, yet the arrest alone sufficed.¹⁵

The twin shows which fact carries the result: custody. Where it exists, the search of the person needs nothing more, and where it is missing, the stop must be justified under the narrower frisk rules.

The categorical rule covers the person, so the question that remains is what counts as part of the person. Robinson's cigarette package sat in the arrestee's pocket, and the Court drew no line between searching his body and examining the package found during that search.¹⁷ Wallets and purses carried on the person are treated the same way, because they are immediately associated with the arrestee.¹⁸ Students lose this issue when they stretch the rule to anything the arrestee happened to be carrying, because larger and separate property follows a different rule.

That different rule comes from United States v. Chadwick. Agents arrested the defendants as they stood beside an open car trunk into which they had just placed a double-locked footlocker, took the defendants, the car, and the footlocker to the federal building, and unlocked the footlocker there without a warrant.¹⁹ The Court held that the search was not incident to the arrest, because once officers have reduced luggage or other property not immediately associated with the person to their exclusive control, and the arrestee can no longer reach it to seize a weapon or destroy evidence, a search of that property is no longer an incident of the arrest.²⁰ Riley later described the exception as limited to “personal property . . . immediately associated with the person of the arrestee,” and noted that the footlocker in Chadwick was a locked, 200-pound item.²¹

The limit follows the reason for the rule. A pocket, a wallet, and a cigarette pack travel with the arrestee and are within reach at every moment of the arrest, so the proximity, stress, and uncertainty that justify searching the body attach to them as well. A locked chest is a separate object. Once officers hold it and the arrestee is in custody, the arrestee cannot get to its contents, so neither the weapon danger nor the evidence danger remains and the justification for a routine search is gone. Whether any later search of such an item can still be defended turns on the arrestee's reach, the subject of the next section, or on a warrant or another exception.

The rule also stops at the body's surface. It reaches the arrestee's clothing, pockets, and immediately associated effects, but it does not extend to intrusions beneath the skin. In Schmerber v. California the Court observed that the considerations behind searching an arrested person have little applicability to intrusions beyond the body's surface, and it upheld a blood draw for alcohol only because the officer might reasonably have believed that the delay needed to obtain a warrant threatened the destruction of evidence.²²

The Robinson logic treats whatever is immediately associated with the person as searchable on the fact of arrest alone. That raises the question Riley answers later in this chapter: whether a cell phone found in an arrestee's pocket is simply another item on the person, like the cigarette package. Riley reaffirmed the categorical character of the Robinson rule while declining to apply it to the phones before the Court.²³

The Grab Area

The grab area is the second of the two zones that Chimel v. California recognizes, and the test that defines it is access. Police may search the area from which the arrestee might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence, which the Court called the area within the arrestee's "immediate control."²⁵ The Court's own illustration was a gun on a table, or in a drawer, in front of the person arrested, which endangers the arresting officer as much as a gun hidden in the arrestee's clothing.²⁶ It found no comparable justification for routinely searching any other room, or for going through all the desk drawers and other closed or concealed areas of the very room where the arrest occurs, and it said that such searches, absent a well-recognized exception, may be made only under a search warrant.²⁷ That last point shapes how the rule is applied, because it shows that the room of the arrest is not the unit of analysis. A drawer in front of the arrestee falls inside the grab area, and a desk full of drawers across the same room does not, so what separates them is whether the arrestee could get to them.

The definition is built from the two dangers that justify the exception in the first place. A weapon within reach lets the arrestee resist the arrest or escape, and evidence within reach can be hidden or destroyed before the officer secures it, so the officer may look wherever the arrestee's hands could go.²⁸ The danger comes from access, not from any sign that the arrestee is armed, a point the Court made in Michigan v. Long when it explained that suspects may injure officers through their access to weapons even though they carry none themselves.²⁹ Where access ends, both dangers end with it. A room the arrestee cannot get to holds no weapon the arrestee can seize and no evidence the arrestee can destroy, so searching it is an ordinary search of a home, and the Fourth Amendment sends ordinary home searches through a magistrate, with the burden on the police to show why they were excused from asking for one.³⁰ The exception is therefore sized to its reasons, since the scope of a search must be tied to the circumstances that made it permissible at the outset.³¹ Without that limit, every arrest made at a house would open the whole house.

Because the test asks what the arrestee could reach, the practical way to apply it is through a short series of factual questions about the moment of the search, drawn from the considerations courts weigh when deciding what an arrestee could actually get to.³²

The sixth step does the real work, and the first five supply the evidence it rests on. Courts in the years right after Chimel tended to find a large area within the arrestee's control despite the arrest, which is the loose habit the factors correct.³³ The location in the first step is the location at the time of the search, so an arrestee already handcuffed and held at the far wall stands differently from one standing beside the item.³⁴ Students lose this issue when they treat presence in the same room as enough, since the rule asks what the arrestee could reach, and a room can be large.

Chimel's own record shows how far a search can run past these limits. Officers came to Chimel's home with a warrant for his arrest on a coin-shop burglary charge but no search warrant, and they waited ten to fifteen minutes for him to return from work.³⁵ When Chimel objected to a search, the officers told him that they would search anyway on the strength of the lawful arrest.³⁶ The search lasted between 45 minutes and an hour, and in the master bedroom and the sewing room the officers directed his wife to open drawers and move their contents so that they could look through them.³⁷ Set that against the gun-on-the-table example. A drawer in front of the arrestee is the kind of place the Court said could be searched, because the arrestee could reach into it. Drawers in other rooms of the house are the kind of place the Court said could not, because nothing about the arrest gave Chimel any way to get to them.

The Court had to overrule earlier decisions to reach that result. Authority to search the place of arrest had swung back and forth for decades: it was asserted broadly in Marron v. United States, narrowed in Go-Bart Importing Co. v. United States and United States v. Lefkowitz, and widened again in Harris v. United States, which upheld the search of a four-room apartment incident to the occupant's arrest. Trupiano v. United States then retreated, and United States v. Rabinowitz again upheld the search of an entire apartment. Chimel overruled Rabinowitz and what remained of Harris and fixed the present boundaries.³⁸ The line held where earlier ones had not because it is defined by function. Tying the area to the two dangers lets an officer answer the question from what is visible at the scene, without asking how large the place is or how much the officers would like to see.

The area is measured around the arrestee wherever the arrestee is at the time of the search, so it moves as the arrestee moves. That explains a rule that might otherwise look like an exception to the limit on other rooms. When the arrestee must put on clothing or do something else before being taken away, officers may accompany the arrestee to the closet or other place where the arrestee is allowed to go, and Washington v. Chrisman treated that accompaniment as reasonable without regard to the degree of risk in the particular case.³⁹ Places the arrestee is permitted to go become places the arrestee can reach, so the officers' authority follows the arrestee's reach. The zone also stops at the walls of the arrest. In Coolidge v. New Hampshire the arrest took place inside the defendant's home while his car sat in the driveway, and after Chimel a search of that car could not be justified as incident to the arrest, since the exception covers only the person and the area within immediate control.⁴⁰

The standard still leaves hard cases. Chimel made clear that the officers could not search the entire house, but it left open whether they could search the whole room where the arrest occurred, whether they could go upstairs, and whether they could open locked containers in a room they were allowed to search.⁴¹ Those uncertainties become acute when the arrestee's surroundings include a car, where a small enclosure can be sat in, stepped out of, or left behind within seconds, and the sections that follow trace how the Court tried to turn the reach test into a rule officers could apply there.