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Searches and Seizures: Roads and Vehicles What's a reasonable expectation of privacy of a person traveling in a car? Can a law enforcement agent pull over any vehicle he or she wants for any reason? Can a police officer search a car without a warrant? What about personal belongings found in the car, such as a purse or a locked briefcase? Excerpts in this category try to shed light on these and other issues relating to searches of cars, buses and other vehicles roaming the roads.
Court Opinions on the Topic:
We have never approved a checkpoint program whose primary purpose was to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing. Rather, our checkpoint cases have recognized only limited exceptions to the general rule that a seizure must be accompanied by some measure of individualized suspicion. We suggested in Prouse, 440 U.S. at 659, that we would not credit the "general interest in crime control" as justification for a regime of suspicionless stops. Consistent with this suggestion, each of the checkpoint programs that we have approved was designed primarily to serve purposes closely related to the problems of policing the border or the necessity of ensuring roadway safety. Because the primary purpose of the Indianapolis narcotics checkpoint program is to uncover evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing, the program contravenes the Fourth Amendment.
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...[W]e express no view on the question whether police may expand the scope of a license or sobriety checkpoint seizure in order to detect the presence of drugs in a stopped car.
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Taken together, our decisions [...] stand for the proposition that suspicionless roadblock seizures are constitutionally permissible if conducted according to a plan that limits the discretion of the officers conducting the stops. [...] I rather doubt that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment would have considered "reasonable" a program of indiscriminate stops of individuals not suspected of wrongdoing.
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...I believe the Court's opinion illustrates several disturbing trends in our disposition of cases involving the rights of citizens who have been accused of crime. First, the Court increasingly tends to reach out and decide issues that are not before it. If the facts in this case are as the Court recounts them, for example, the propriety of these lengthy detentions would not appear to be governed by the Terry line of cases at all, and the Court's opinion is therefore little more than 13 pages of ill-considered dicta. Second, the Court of late shows increasing eagerness to make purely factual findings in the first instance where convenient to support its desired result. For example, the Court's conclusion in this case that Savage "sought to elude the police" is a de novo factual determination resting on a record that is ambiguous at best. Finally, the Court in criminal cases increasingly has evaded the plain requirements of our precedents where they would stand in the way of a judgement for the government.
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...[T]o fail to apply the [warrant] exception to vehicles such as a motor home ignores the fact that a motor home lends itself easily to use as an instrument of illicit drug traffic and other illegal activity.
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