Is the Supreme Court Waffling on the 4th Amendment Right against unreasonable searches?
I previously blogged about the 4th amendment right against warrantless searches.
My blog was about the effects of a U.S. Supreme Court decision called Arizona v. Gant, a 2009 case. That case held that the 4th amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects individuals from warrantless searches unless one of the limited exceptions applied (like searching incident to an arrest). In Gant, a person got out of his car voluntarily, incident to a stop for his suspended driver’s license. He was handcuffed and put in a police cruiser (that means he was arrested for the suspended license offense). Thereafter, the police searched his car and found drugs and a gun and charged him for that. Gant was not even close to his car so why search the car; and there was no good reason to suspect that there was evidence of another crime in the car. The police searched it anyway, essentially conducting a fishing expedition at the expense of Mr. Gant’s constitutional rights. No doubt they hoped to find something else to charge him with, not unlike a lot of searches after an arrest. The Court said that the search was an unconstitutional 4th amendment violation because the search had nothing to do with the offense which caused the stop. See my prior post called “Unreasonable Searches – Police Can’t Search Anything Everywhere Anytime.”
Well, this week, the court elaborated on Gant in its decision called Davis v. United States. In Davis, the Defendant was stopped for a routine traffic infraction and arrested for providing a false name. After being handcuffed and the scene being secured, the police found a firearm. He was later charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. In a suppression motion for that case, he raised the fourth amendment objection to the search of the car where the gun was found. According to the law at that time, Davis was properly convicted. On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gant, the aforementioned case. Gant overturned the law as it applied to Davis, so Davis expected the Supremes to overturn his conviction and remand the case for further handling of the case in light of their ruling in Gant. However, that’s not what happened. Boo! The Supreme Court said that because the Davis trial court followed the law as it existed pre-Gant, they would allow the search because the cost and effort to overturn and remand all the cases which were like Gant and Davis would be too much. Really . . . are they truly saying that they won’t overturn past cases on this issue but only future ones. All I have to say is that Gant was a case in the past that had to be overturned because THE 4th AMENDMENT RIGHTS OF GANT WERE VIOLATED, despite the burden and cost upon the government. Now, are the Supremes waffling? In my humble opinion, yes they are.
