MISTAH WARREN, HE DEAD:

Supreme Court rules that the police can seize evidence after an arrest (The Associated Press, April 23, 2008)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police can conduct searches and seize evidence after arrests that may turn out to have violated state law.

The unanimous decision came in a case from Portsmouth, Virginia, where city detectives seized crack cocaine from a motorist after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense. David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for the police to issue a court summons and to let the driver go.

Instead, the detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors in the case said that drugs taken from him in a subsequent search could be used against him as evidence.

"We reaffirm against a novel challenge what we have signaled for half a century," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court. Scalia said that when officers have probable cause to believe a person had committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest and to search the suspect to safeguard evidence and to ensure their own safety.

In historical terms we might consider this Court to be 7 conservatives and 2 moderates.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 23, 2008 6:30 PM