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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. Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6›
Inventory searches are not subject to the warrant requirement because they are conducted by the government as part of a "community caretaking" function, "totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute." Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S., at 441. Standardized procedures are necessary to ensure that this narrow exception is not improperly used to justify, after the fact, a warrantless investigative foray. Accordingly, to invalidate a search that is conducted without established procedures, it is not necessary to establish that the police actually acted in bad faith, or that the inventory was in fact a "pretext." By allowing the police unfettered discretion, Boulder's discretionary scheme [...] is unreasonable because of the "'grave danger' of abuse of discretion."
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In Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 461-462 (1971), a plurality of this Court stated: "The word 'automobile' is not a talisman in whose presence the Fourth Amendment fades away and disappears." By upholding the search in this case, the Court not only ignores that principle, but creates another talisman to overcome the requirements of the Fourth Amendment -- the term "inventory."
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The Fourth Amendment permits police officers to approach bus passengers at random to ask questions and to request their consent to searches, provided a reasonable person would understand that he or she is free to refuse. Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429, 115 L. Ed. 2d 389, 111 S. Ct. 2382 (1991).
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A police officer may be allowed sufficient latitude to determine whether a particular container should or should not be opened in light of the nature of the search and characteristics of the container itself. Thus, while policies of opening all containers or of opening no containers are unquestionably permissible, it would be equally permissible, for example, to allow the opening of closed containers whose contents officers determine they are unable to ascertain from examining the containers' exteriors. The allowance of the exercise of judgment based on concerns related to the purposes of an inventory search does not violate the Fourth Amendment.
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The facts of this case demonstrate a prime danger of insufficiently regulated inventory searches: police may use the excuse of an "inventory search" as a pretext for broad searches of vehicles and their contents.
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