NAPO Press Release
SUPPORTING LAW
ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS’ RIGHTS
The amicus curiae, or "a friend of the court", brief was filed in support of the Petitioner, the Wyoming Attorney General, for the reversal of the judgment of the Supreme Court of the State of Wyoming, which established a novel precedent favoring defendants in vehicular search cases.
"The Wyoming court created a loophole for lawful searches of vehicles big enough to drive a car through. If this case is not reversed, NAPO fears that vehicles will basically become off limits to searches by law enforcement officers," said Robert T. Scully, NAPO’s executive director.
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Early on the morning of July 23, 1995, Wyoming Highway Patrol Officer Delane Baldwin stopped an automobile for speeding and a faulty brake light on an interstate highway. The car contained three occupants, the driver, David Young, and two passengers in the front seat, specifically Young’s girlfriend and the Respondent, Sandra Houghton.
While asking for Young’s driver’s license and other papers, the officer noticed a hypodermic syringe in Young’s shirt pocket. He told Young that he had seen the syringe and that he was going to retrieve gloves from the patrol car. Upon returning, the officer ordered Young out of the car and told him to place the syringe on the hood. Another officer kept an eye on the occupants. The officer asked what the syringe was for, and Young responded that he had used the syringe to take drugs. At that point, all the passengers were ordered out of the vehicle, asked to identify themselves, and patted-down for weapons (none were found). The Respondent gave a false name, "Sandra Jones".
Officer Baldwin then began a search of the passenger compartment for drug-related contraband, based on Young’s admission that he had used the syringe to inject himself with drugs, constituting probable cause for the search. The officer found a closed lady’s purse on the middle of the back seat. He removed a wallet from the purse and located the Respondent’s driver’s license, identifying her as Sandra Houghton, not Sandra Jones. When the officer asked her about this, she replied, it was "in case things went bad." Around this time, although unclear as to exactly when, the respondent admitted that the purse was hers.
At that point, the officer removed a brown bag from the purse, in which he found a syringe containing approximately 60 cc’s of a liquid, which subsequently proved to be methamphetamine (based on an on-site test). He also found more syringes, razor blades and other drug paraphernalia inside the bag. Respondent Houghton apparently denied ownership of these items and others subsequently pulled from her purse. Looking at the Respondent’s arms, the officer found fresh needle track marks. The officer then arrested the Respondent. Subsequently, he found a smaller black bag containing more syringes and a vial, which contained more methamphetamine and other drug paraphernalia. Ironically, Young was not arrested, because the small amount of residue left in his syringe would have been more difficult to test for and there was much more evidence against the Respondent.
Respondent Houghton was charged with possession of a controlled substance, a felony. She moved to suppress all evidence seized. After a hearing, the trial court denied her motion and ruled that when an officer has probable cause to believe that contraband is somewhere in a car, as here, he or she may search the car and any containers within the car which could hold the contraband, including a passenger’s purse. Therefore, the evidence was admitted at trial, and Houghton was convicted.
Houghton appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court on the ground that the search violated her reasonable expectation of privacy in her personal belongings, absent specific probable cause to believe that contraband was in her purse.
On April 3, 1998, the Wyoming Supreme Court rendered an opinion, holding that the search of Respondent’s purse violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and excluded the evidence seized from it. Houghton v. State of Wyoming, 956 P.2d 363 (Wyo. 1998). In its analysis, the court changed the focus of this case from an automobile search to a search of a guest and his or her personal effects on fixed premises. The Court relied upon cases, such as Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U.S. 85, 100 S.Ct. 338 (1979), which analyzed the scope of a search warrant in a residential or commercial building involving a guest and the guest’s personal items in that building. (There, the Court ruled that a warrant limited to a search of a tavern and the bartender did not permit a pat-down search of a patron sitting at the bar, since that was beyond the scope of the warrant.) The court adopted a "notice" test, limiting the scope of a permissible search, once a law enforcement officer becomes aware that a container in a vehicle belongs to a passenger. The court concluded, as follows:
Generally, once probable cause is established to search a vehicle, an officer is entitled to search all containers therein which may contain the object of the search. However, if the officer knows or should know that a container is the personal effect of a passenger who is not suspected of criminal activity, then the container is outside the scope of the search unless someone had the opportunity to conceal the contraband within the personal effect to avoid detection. Here, the officers knew or should have known that the purse did not belong to the driver, but to one of the passengers. Since there was no probable cause to search the passengers’ personal effects and no reason to believe that contraband had been placed within the purse, the search was unreasonable and in violation of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from such governmental intrusion. We, therefore, reverse the district court’s denial of Houghton’s motion to suppress....[956 P.2d at 372].
Two of the five Justices of the Wyoming Supreme Court dissented from this ruling. A petition for a rehearing was denied on April 28, 1998. The State of Wyoming then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari on July 27, 1998. The Court granted review on September 29, 1998.
SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT IN NAPO’s AMICUS BRIEF
Under past Supreme Court cases, the automobile exception (to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement) allows law enforcement officers having probable cause to believe that contraband may be found in an automobile, to conduct a search of the passenger compartment and all containers located therein which may contain the objective of the search, irrespective of ownership of the containers. Occupants of automobiles (both drivers and passengers) possess a diminished expectation of privacy in any container, including a woman’s purse, left behind by an owner exiting the vehicle. The Wyoming Supreme Court has created a major exception to the principles expounded in this Court’s Carroll, Ross, and Acevedo cases. It has significantly limited the scope of the search of containers in an automobile to exclude containers or other property not belonging to the driver, by applying a "notice of ownership" test, sometimes applied in cases involving fixed premises but rarely, if ever, applied in automobile cases.
Wyoming’s three-part "notice" test is confusing and unworkable during the course of lawful searches for contraband in passenger compartments of automobiles. This test does not provide clear and viable guidelines; instead, it requires law enforcement officers to make difficult, if not impossible, determinations concerning which containers and items in a vehicle accurately belong to which person and therefore can be lawfully searched. It will enable those who are committing (or have committed) criminal offenses to easily evade a lawful and reasonable search, and it will curtail effective law enforcement. There is much opportunity for drivers and passengers inside a moving vehicle, either before or during a traffic stop, to transfer an item into a container, to transfer contraband from one container to another container without being detected, or to develop a story of who should claim ownership of a container. In fact, law enforcement officers routinely uncover such efforts when conducting searches for illegal drugs, weapons, and other contraband. The "notice" test thus creates a loophole and will encourage these efforts. Therefore, it is reasonable for a law enforcement officer having probable cause to search any container found in an automobile’s passenger compartment, which conceivably could contain the object of the search, unconstrained by claims of ownership.
Alternatively, the search of Respondent’s purse can be justified on another ground. Whenever a law enforcement officer has probable cause to arrest a driver, which existed in this case, the officer may conduct a search of the passenger compartment, presumed by law to be the area "within the reach" of the individual arrested or to be arrested. The fact that an arrest had not occurred before the search in this case is irrelevant, as long as the officer initially had probable cause to arrest the driver. This is because there is considerable leeway granted as to the timing of an arrest. NAPO emphasized to the Court that it could find no appellate decisions requiring that containers found within the passenger compartment be the personal property of the individual (usually the driver), as to whom there is probable cause to arrest, before those containers could be searched. The rationale for such a search is to find any weapon which could be used against the officer and prevent the destruction of evidence. The ownership of a container concealing a weapon or evidence is irrelevant to these purposes of officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence.
Therefore, the brief concluded that the "notice" test devised by the Wyoming Supreme Court is not required by the Fourth Amendment during lawful searches of passenger compartments, and it urged the Supreme Court to reverse that court’s decision in this case.
NAPO’S INTEREST IN THIS CASE
NAPO’s members have a significant interest in the important issues of law before this Court and the impact of the Court’s decision on law enforcement. First, this case will delineate the extent to which law enforcement officers may conduct "probable cause" searches of automobile passenger compartments, and, specifically, the limitations placed on the scope of such searches. This case may also decide the restrictions to be placed on searches of a passenger compartment when there is probable cause to arrest, including the strict limitations on what items or containers may be searched, even if they are within the passenger compartment and therefore presumed by law to be within the "reach of the arrestee", the legal principle sanctioned by this Court. The outcome of this case may also bear on whether law enforcement officers can fully protect themselves by conducting searches for weapons upon stopping a motor vehicle, when they have probable cause to both arrest an occupant and conduct a search (the probable cause arising either before or after the stop).
"As one of the largest police advocacy organizations, NAPO is concerned with the ability of police officers to conduct effective and thorough searches whenever they have probable cause to search a vehicle for evidence of criminal activity, free of unreasonable, confusing, and unworkable restrictions on what may be searched within the passenger compartment," said Robert T. Scully, NAPO’s executive director. "NAPO is vitally concerned with the safety of law enforcement officers. Stopping a motor vehicle constitutes one of the least predictable and potentially most dangerous duties of a law enforcement officer, " continued Scully.
The National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) is a coalition of police unions and associations from across the United States that serves in Washington, DC to advance the interests of America’s law enforcement officers through legislative and legal advocacy, political action and education. Founded in 1978, NAPO now represents more than 4,000 police unions and associations, 250,000 sworn law enforcement officers, 3,000 retired officers and more than 100,000 citizens who share a common dedication to fair and effective crime control and law enforcement.###