Delayed Vehicle Searches

Delayed Vehicle Searches

Probable cause settles whether officers may search a vehicle without a warrant, but it does not say where or when the search must happen. The roadside is the natural place, yet officers often arrest the occupants first and move the car to a police lot or station before anyone opens it. The question is whether the exception survives that detour. In Chambers v. Maroney the Court held that it does: when police have probable cause to search a vehicle at the time they stop it, they may search it immediately, or seize it, tow it to the station, and search it later without a warrant.¹ That holding follows from the two rationales taught earlier in this chapter, and the rest of this section traces how.

Chambers was introduced earlier for the probable cause its facts supplied, and the feature that matters here is the sequence. Police stopped the matching station wagon within an hour of the robbery, arrested the four occupants, and drove the car to the police station. Only there did they search it thoroughly without a warrant, finding two .38-caliber revolvers concealed in a compartment under the dashboard.² The Court first set aside the most obvious justification. The reasons that support a warrantless search in connection with an arrest, such as protecting officers and preserving evidence within the arrestee's reach, no longer apply once the accused is safely in custody at the station house, so a search made at another place after the arrest is not incident to it.³ Search incident to arrest is a separate doctrine with its own limits, taught elsewhere, and all that matters here is that the station search needed some other support.

The other support was Carroll. As Chambers read it, the right to search a vehicle and the validity of its seizure do not depend on the right to arrest. They depend on the reasonable cause the officer has to believe that the vehicle's contents offend the law.⁴ That separation explains why the arrest, though valid, drops out of the analysis. Whether the arrest was lawful and where the search took place do not decide the issue. The police had probable cause to believe the robbers, carrying guns and the fruits of the crime, had fled in a light blue compact station wagon carrying four men, and they stopped a car matching that description.⁵ Everything then turned on whether that cause let them wait until the car reached the station.

The Court's answer begins with the mobility rationale. The circumstances that furnish probable cause to search a particular car are usually unforeseeable, and the chance to search is fleeting because the car can be driven away. If an effective search is to happen at all, officers must either search at once without a warrant or seize the car and hold it for as long as a warrant takes.⁶ A reader might expect the second route to be the cautious one, since a magistrate would approve the search before anyone opens the car. The Court declined to rank the two. Which course is the greater intrusion is debatable and may depend on the circumstances, and it saw no constitutional difference between holding the car until probable cause is put before a magistrate and searching immediately. Given probable cause, either course is reasonable.⁷ The station-house search was therefore the roadside search postponed. The car could have been searched on the spot, probable cause still existed at the station, and the alternative of holding the car for a warrant would have denied anyone its use in the meantime, leaving little to choose in practical consequences.⁸

Both rationales explain why the move to the station does not matter. Under the mobility rationale, exigency is judged when the car is seized on the public road, and from that moment the police may conduct either an immediate or a delayed search.⁹ The exception also carries no separate exigency requirement, so officers need not show that the circumstances of the particular case made a warrant hard to get, and the fact that the car sits immobilized at the station does not revive a warrant requirement that would not have applied at the roadside.¹⁰ The privacy rationale reaches the same result from another direction. Vehicles are subject to pervasive and continuing regulation, including licensing, periodic inspection, and stops for expired tags or faulty equipment, and that regulation is what lowers the occupant's expectation of privacy.¹¹ The regulation attaches to the car as a licensed motor vehicle wherever it is parked, so towing it to a lot does not restore the privacy the regulatory scheme already reduced. Together the two justifications yield the Court's own summary of the rule: police may search later whenever they could have searched earlier.¹²

That summary makes the moment of the stop the pivot of every delayed-search problem. If the officers had probable cause when they seized the car, the later search inherits the authority an immediate search would have had. If they lacked it then, the later search has nothing to inherit, and the arrest cannot fill the gap. Preston v. United States marks that line. The arrest there was for vagrancy, and it was apparent that the officers had no cause to believe evidence of any crime was concealed in the car, so a later search at another place could rest on neither the arrest nor probable cause.¹³ Both Preston and Chambers involved an arrest followed by a search elsewhere, so the arrest and the relocation cannot explain the different results. What differed was whether the facts known at the stop pointed to evidence in the car.

How much delay the exception tolerates is a separate question, and the decisions apply the timing requirement loosely. In United States v. Johns police stopped a vehicle on probable cause, removed packages from it, and searched the packages several days later. The Court upheld the search because the defendants had not shown that the delay harmed any legitimate Fourth Amendment interest.¹⁴ The rare decision that enforced timing strictly is Coolidge v. New Hampshire. Police arrested Coolidge at home for murder, impounded his car from the front driveway, and searched it two days later and again a year later. The Court required a warrant, because the police had long suspected Coolidge and this very car, so there was no alerted criminal bent on flight and no fleeting opportunity on an open highway, and nothing stopped them from seeking a warrant.¹⁵ The contrast with Chambers lies in what the officers faced when they seized the car: a getaway car stopped on the road within the hour, against a long-suspected car sitting outside the suspect's home. The later section on curtilage returns to cars parked at a home and adds a further limit.

Step one decides most exam stems. Stems tend to describe the tow and the station-house search in detail, which tempts the reader to test the search against the arrest, when probable cause at the time of the stop is the fact to hunt for.