Although we have not yet seen the flurry of end-of-term opinions sure to emerge from the Supreme Court in June, few are likely to gain as much immediate attention as Arizona v. Gant, in which the Court imposed new Fourth Amendment limitations on the ability of police officers to search vehicles.  The CrimProf listserve has been buzzing about Gant since the opinion came out, and now we are beginning to see the first signs of fallout in the lower courts.  Rising 3L Brent Simerson sent me the following insightful comments about the significance of Gant, for which I am grateful:

As one might expect, the United States Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Arizona v. Gant has triggered changes in the way police officers and attorneys must analyze warrantless searches incident to a lawful arrest in the vehicle context.  Professor Jon Deitrich provided several interesting observations about the opinion itself in a post last week.  The Court held that police officers may “search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant’s arrest only when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search.”  This holding narrowed the Court’s prior holdings in Chimel v. California and New York v. Belton, which were largely interpreted by lower courts as permitting vehicular searches incident to a lawful arrest regardless of how improbable it was that the arrestee could access the automobile.  Gant will undoubtedly constrict law enforcement’s hitherto broad authority to search vehicles incident to lawful arrest, see United States v. Majette, No. 08-4427, 2009 U.S. App. LEXIS 9267 (4th Cir. Apr. 30, 2009) (conviction vacated pursuant to Gant), but it is too soon to describe how courts will answer tough questions presented by Gant‘s requirements: What constitutes a “secured” arrestee?  May police officers circumscribe the spirit of Gant by directing the unsecured arrestee to remain within reaching distance of the passenger compartments?  These fact-sensitive questions will take time to resolve.

After the issuance of a particularly fractured decision, featuring multiple concurrences and dissents, former Chief Justice Rehnquist once quipped, “I didn’t know we had that many people on our Court.”  The quote came to mind after reading a recent Supreme Court decision, Arizona v. Gant, in which Justice Scalia did something rather unusual and, from the perspective of those tasked with application of the Court’s often splintered decisions, laudatory.  He provided the fifth vote needed to produce a majority opinion, despite the fact that he did not entirely agree with the opinion he joined.

In Gant, the Court addressed the scope of the “search-incident-to-arrest” exception to the warrant requirement established in Chimel v. California.  In Chimel, the Court held that police may, incident to an arrest, search the area within the arrestee’s immediate control, i.e., the area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence.  In New York v. Belton, the Court extended the rule, holding that police may also search the passenger compartment of the vehicle from which an arrestee was taken.  Most lower courts understood Belton to permit a vehicle search incident to arrest even when there was no real possibility that the arrestee could gain access to the vehicle at the time of the search.  Some courts even allowed a search under Belton when the handcuffed arrestee had already left the scene.

Gant presented an opportunity to narrow this construction of the Belton rule.