ARIZONA V GANT

Arizona v Gant

Arizona v Gant

Introduction

The police have the powers under section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) to arrest without warrant for arrestable offences; these section of PACE, like all the other sections has many subsections. I have found seven subsections to section 24, these subsections break down under what conditions that a police officer may arrest somebody without a warrant and what an arrestable offence is.

Arizona v. Gant

Arizona v. Gant, was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution requires law enforcement officers to demonstrate an actual and continuing threat to their safety posed by an arrestee, or a need to preserve evidence related to the crime of arrest from tampering by the arrestee, in order to justify a warrant less vehicular search incident to arrest conducted after the vehicle's recent occupants have been arrested and secured.

The case involved Rodney J. Gant, who was arrested by Tucson, Arizona police and charged with driving on a suspended driver's license. Police arrested Gant in a friend's yard after he had parked his vehicle and was walking away. Gant and all other suspects on the scene were then secured in police patrol cars. The officers then searched Gant's vehicle. After finding a weapon and a bag of cocaine, they also charged him with possession of a narcotic for sale and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Thomas Frank Jacobs (Tucson, Arizona), lead counsel for Rodney Gant, argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court on October 7, 2008. Jacobs argued that an unreasonable expansion of a limited authority to search vehicles incident to arrest provided by the Supreme Court's 1981 decision in New York v. Belton was occurring. Lower courts were allowing searches after the initial justifications for setting aside the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement had ceased to exist, relying on a so-called bright-line rule of "if arrest, then search." Jacobs argued, and the Court ultimately agreed, that such application of the Belton exception caused the exception to "swallow the rule," allowing unconstitutional searches.

A group of legal scholars, including University of Iowa law professor James Tomkovicz, wrote an amicus curiae brief asking the court to overturn its precedent from a 1981 case, New York v. Belton that gives police the right to search a person's vehicle even if that person is not in the vehicle. According to Tomkovicz, Belton fails to meet the constitutional standard of probable cause.

In an opinion delivered by Justice Stevens, the Supreme Court held that police may search the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to a recent occupant's arrest only if it is reasonable to believe that the arrestee might access the vehicle at the time of the search or that the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest.

Justice Scalia wrote a concurring opinion, "In my view we should simply abandon the Belton-Thornton charade of officer safety and overrule those cases. I would hold that a vehicle search incident to arrest is ipso facto ...