And to be practical, they always could. We’re all grownups here, right? We all know that cops lie about probable cause to search, and now the famously corrupt PA State Supreme Court has given them its blessing. Seamus fucking McCaffery wrote the opinion? The judge whose lawyer wife was making big money referring clients to law firms? The same wife whose ticket he tried to fix?
Oh yeah, we have a great Supreme Court here:
As it turns out, until a few days ago, if you got pulled over in PA doin’ 55 in a 54 or what have you, you could have told a police officer who asked to search your car “Well, my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk and the back, and I know my rights so you go’n need a warrant for that,” and you would have been correct. That is no longer the case. According to Lancaster Online, “Pennsylvania police officers no longer need a warrant to search a citizen’s vehicle, according to a recent state Supreme Court opinion.”
The way it used to work, with marijuana for an example, is that an officer who smelled weed could only search the car with the driver’s consent or if illegal substances were in plain view. For an additional search, a warrant was needed. But now, “it only takes reasonable probable cause for an officer to go ahead with a search without a warrant.” The opinion, authored by chief justice Seamus McCaffery, says that PA now adopts “the federal automobile exception… which allows police officers to search a motor vehicle when there is probable cause to do so.” And Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman said the ruling puts PA in line with federal law and many other states. For what it’s worth, Jay-Z’s legal advice in “99 Problems” is no longer good advice in PA and even at the time of the song’s realase, was not good advice on a federal level. According to an actual law journal article on the matter:
If this Essay serves no other purpose, I hope it serves to debunk, for any readers who persist in believing it, the myth that locking your trunk will keep the cops from searching it. Based on the number of my students who arrived at law school believing that if you lock your trunk and glove compartment, the police will need a warrant to search them, I surmise that it’s even more widespread among the lay public. But it’s completely, 100% wrong. There is no warrant requirement for car searches. The Supreme Court has declared unequivocally that because cars are inherently mobile (and are pervasively regulated, and operated in public spaces), it is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment for the police to search the car—the whole car, and everything in the car, including containers—whenever they have probable cause to believe that the car contains evidence of crime. You don’t have to arrest the person, or impound the vehicle. You just need probable cause to believe that the car contains evidence of crime. So, in any vehicle stop, the officers may search the entire car, without consent, if they develop probable cause to believe that car contains, say, drugs.”
H/t Seth Okin.
The Motor Vehicle Exception Rule was established by the US Supreme Court in 1925 in Carroll v US. It’s been upheld several times since. Until recently a dog was sent to “sniff” a car. If the dog “hit” then probable cause was established and the car was searched without a warrant being issued. The dog “hit” almost 100% of the time whether or not there were any drugs present. Now that don’t need the expense of calling a dog and its master to the scene. That’s progress?
That’s exactly how some poor slob got repeatedly anal probed over night in New Mexico. A dog, who wasn’t certified, which had already been shown to not be accurate, continued to be used and then ‘hit’ on a guy whose only crime was rolling through a stop sign. He ended up winning a couple of million, but it won’t have any effect. The goal is to intimidate.