The Supreme Court today decided Virginia v. Moore, holding 8-1-0 that an arrest based on probable cause is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment even though the officer was not authorized by state law to arrest for that offense. David Moore was properly stopped for driving with a suspended license. The officers arrested him instead of citing him, as they were supposed to do, and the search incident to arrest revealed 16g of crack.
The actual question in the case is the admissibility of the crack in evidence. The drastic, disproportionate, ill-advised remedy of exclusion of valid evidence once again spills over into the substantive law of the Fourth Amendment.
The case really wasn't too difficult in light of two precedents. Atwater v. Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318 (2001) held that there was no "minor offense" threshold on arrests under the Fourth Amendment. A state can, if it wishes, authorize arrests for any offense, no matter how trivial. Many states do, of course, apply a threshold, as the Virginia statute did in this case.
The other important precedent is California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988). The Court settled 20 years ago that a state constitutional limitation on searches is not automatically bootstrapped into the federal Fourth Amendment. The people of California had wisely repealed the state exclusionary rule in 1982, but the state court precedents construing the constitutional search and seizure provision more broadly than the U.S. Supreme Court had construed the Fourth Amendment were still in force. Hence, searching the garbage placed outside for collection was a violation of the state but not federal constitutional provision. The federal constitution did not operate in this situation to require exclusion of evidence obtained in a manner that violated state but not federal limitations.
That remedial issue was also central to today's decision:
If we concluded otherwise, we would often frustrate rather than further state policy. Virginia chooses to protect individual privacy and dignity more than the Fourth Amendment requires, but it also chooses not to attach to violations of its arrest rules the potent remedies that federal courts have applied to Fourth Amendment violations.... Moore would allow Virginia to accord enhanced protection against arrest only on pain of accompanying that protection with federal remedies for Fourth Amendment violations, which often include the exclusionary rule. States unwilling to lose control over the remedy would have to abandon restrictions on arrest altogether. This is an odd consequence of a provision designed to protect against searches and seizures.
Eight Justices joined this opinion. Justice Ginsburg concurred only in the result, but she agrees on this point:
Moore would have us ignore, however, the limited consequences Virginia attaches to a police officer’s failure to follow the Commonwealth’s summons-only instruction. For such an infraction, the officer may be disciplined and the person arrested may bring a tort suit against the officer. But Virginia law does not demand the suppression of evidence seized by an officer who arrests when he should have issued a summons.
The Fourth Amendment, today’s decision holds, does not put States to an all-or-nothing choice in this regard. A State may accord protection against arrest beyond what the Fourth Amendment requires, yet restrict the remedies available when police deny to persons they apprehend the extra protection state law orders.
This unanimity is good to see.
Leave a comment