US Supreme Court Texas v. Brown 81-419

Decided April 19, 1983.

   Brown was stopped at a driver's license checkpoint.  After the officer requested his license, he took a tied-off balloon full of something out of his pocket and dropped it in the car, then opened the glove compartment (which contained drug paraphernalia), rummaged around in it for a moment, and then admitted he didn't have a license with him.  Why he chose to proudly display the incriminating contents of his glove box to the officer, we will never know.

   The officer told him to get out of the car, and he did.  Knowing that balloons like that are often used to package controlled substances, the officer retrieved the balloon and then arrested Brown.  The balloon was later found to contain heroin, and an inventory of the car revealed a "green, leafy substance."  Brown argued that none of this should be admissible as evidence, and that the plain view doctrine did not apply to this case, and the case found its way to The Supreme Court.

   In its decision, the court explored some exceptions to the warrant requirement (there's actually a nice little laundry list of landmark cases in the middle of the decision).  Focusing on plain view: the court stated that the question whether property in plain view of the police may be seized must turn on the legality of the intrusion that enables them to perceive and physically seize the property in question, and plain view provides grounds for seizure of an item when an officer's access to an object has some prior justification under the Fourth Amendment.

   In other words, the plain view doctrine allows officers to seize evidence which they already legally have access to (such as if the evidence is in a public place, or if the evidence is discovered while they're executing a search warrant or conducting a search pursuant to an exception to the warrant requirement).  The decision also notes that the evidence has to be inadvertently discovered, which specifically means that the police can't use plain view as a ruse to discover evidence that they already knew the location of.  Finally, the decision states that the incriminating nature of the evidence must be immediately apparent.

   That last one was a sticking point for one of the lower courts, which had incorrectly suppressed the evidence in this case.  The lower court had interpreted "immediately apparent" to mean that the police must have iron-clad proof that something is incriminating before they could seize it under plain view.  The supreme court clarified that in order to seize something under plain view, the police need only have probable cause to believe that it was evidence.

   There's also some discussion in this decision of the probable cause standard: "As the Court frequently has remarked, probable cause is a flexible, common-sense standard. It merely requires that the facts available to the officer would warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief, that certain items may be contraband or stolen property or useful as evidence of a crime; it does not demand any showing that such a belief be correct or more likely true than false."

   Other than that, the most interesting part of the decision spells out that using flashlights to illuminate the interior of a car (like using a "marine glass or field glass") is not a search, and neither is moving around to get a better vantage point to see what is inside a car.

   The Supreme Court ruled that the evidence in this case was admissible under the plain view doctrine.