{"id":192269,"date":"2009-04-22T23:19:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T04:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/22\/supreme-court-discovers-the-4th-amendment\/"},"modified":"2009-04-22T23:19:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T04:19:00","slug":"supreme-court-discovers-the-4th-amendment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/22\/supreme-court-discovers-the-4th-amendment\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Discovers the 4th Amendment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Arizona v. Gant<\/span>, by a 5\/4 decision, the Supreme Court <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2009\/04\/21\/AR2009042102125.html?hpid=topnews\">largely reversed <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">New York v. Belton<\/span><\/a>, which had said that a police officer could search a car when they arrested someone without probable cause.<\/p>\n<p>It was an odd mix of judges too who voted in favor of the 4th amendment, Stevens, Souter,Ginsburg, Scalia(!) and Thomas (!!!).<\/p>\n<p>Basically, the old rule was that if you arrested someone, you could search his car, and now the standard is, &#8220;police may search a vehicle without a warrant only when the suspect could reach for a weapon or try to destroy evidence, or when it is &#8216;reasonable to believe&#8217; there is evidence in the car supporting the crime at hand.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The other 4, including the 2GW Bush appointees, think that it will be too confusing, but it&#8217;s not:  If you arrest someone for an expired license, or not seat belting their kids, and they are <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">away from the car<\/span>, you do not have authority to search it.<\/p>\n<p>This ain&#8217;t rocket science.<sup>*<\/sup><\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size:78%;\">Full Disclosure, in 1999-2000 and 1996-1998, I worked as a mechanical engineer for what is now Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and I have some claim to actually having been a rocket scientist.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Arizona v. Gant, by a 5\/4 decision, the Supreme Court largely reversed New York v. Belton, which had said that a police officer could search a car when they arrested someone without probable cause. It was an odd mix of judges too who voted in favor of the 4th amendment, Stevens, Souter,Ginsburg, Scalia(!) and &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,972],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}