The Supreme Court affirmed that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law.  Defendant was convicted for possessing cocaine with the intent to distribute, but his conviction was reversed by the Virginia Supreme Court. The court reasoned that since arresting officers should have issued defendant a citation for driving with a suspended license under state law rather than arresting him and the Fourth Amendment did not permit search incident to citation, an arrest search violated the Fourth Amendment. David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for police to issue a court summons and let the driver go. After police confirmed his license was suspended, they arrested him for the misdemeanor even though under Va. Code Ann. § 19.2-74, they should have only issued him a summons. A search subsequent to arrest revealed he was carrying crack cocaine. Moore was convicted on a drug charge and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that police should have released Moore and could not lawfully conduct a search. Virginia courts dismissed the indictment against Moore.The judgment of the Supreme Court of Virginia was reversed, and the case was remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with the opinion. 9-0 decision; 1 concurrence. Moore argued that the Fourth Amendment permits a search only following a lawful state arrest. The Court noted that its decisions counseled against changing the calculus that the arrest was constitutionally reasonable because there was probable cause to believe defendant committed the minor crime in the officer's presence. The Court had treated additional protections exclusively as matters of state law. Virginia chose to protect individual privacy and dignity more than the Fourth Amendment required, but it also chose not to attach to violations of its arrest rules the potent remedies that federal courts had applied to Fourth Amendment violations. Linking Fourth Amendment protections to state law would have meant losing a bright-line constitutional standard as well as causing those protection to vary from place to place and from time to time. Because the arrest was constitutional, the search incident to the arrest was also constitutional. The federal government said Moore's case had the potential to greatly increase the class of unconstitutional arrests, resulting in evidence seized during searches being excluded with increasing frequency. Looking to state laws to provide the basis for searches would introduce uncertainty into the legal system. http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/06-1082.pdf |
по-русски | 
in english
