Following up on my last two posts (ROLLING PROBABLE CAUSE and CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ), I am looking back at recent United States Supreme Court rulings to try to see where they might be heading. Citizens United certainly does not bode well. I do not wish to diminish concern about the future actions of the Court, especially those of the 5 company men responsible for Citizens United, but there still seemed to be little rays of light and hope in the last year or so (some even authored by the conservative activists in this recent majority).

A good example (and one that also touches on the subjects addressed in my ROLLING PROBABLE CAUSE post from yesterday) is the Court’s decision last April in Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. ___ (2009) (full text here: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-542.pdf  .   Gant was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that the Fourth Amendment requires police to demonstrate that an arrested individual poses an actual and continuing threat to their safety, or a need to prevent an arrested individual from tampering with evidence related to the crime of arrest, in order to justify a post-arrest warrantless search of a vehicle. This was a significant retreat from the so-called  "automobile exception" to the 4^th Amendment’s warrant requirement.

This automobile exception dates back to the Court’s decision in Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132 (1925). In Carroll, the Court decreed that a warrant was not required for a vehicle search, so long as there existed probable cause to believe that the vehicle contained contraband or evidence of a crime. This "automobile exception" has been greatly expanded since Carroll, with subsequent rulings holding, for example, that a mobile home capable of traveling on a highway fit within the exception, and that the police may search the personal belongings of passengers in a vehicle, even if those passengers were not already subject to arrest.

In New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981), the Court held that the police may search an automobile's passenger compartment without a warrant after arresting an occupant of the vehicle, since a criminal may hide contraband or weapons in the vehicle before the arrest. With the subsequent decision in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista , 532 U.S. 318 (2001), holding that law enforcement may arrest motorists for even petty traffic violations, the police were given an incentive to arrest minor traffic violators in order to use the Belton ruling to search their vehicles.

But now, with Arizona v. Gant, the Court has moved the 4^th Amendment goal posts back a bit toward protection against unreasonable searches of vehicles. Police may no longer automatically search the interior of a car after a suspect has been arrested. In his opinion for the majority, Justice Stevens discussed the unfortunate impact of the Court’s prior decisions:

Can I get an amen?