Last year the Supreme Court held in Arizona v. Gant that law enforcement officials cannot search a vehicle, pursuant to a legal arrest when the suspect is out of the vehicle and is not within hand’s reach of the passenger compartment of the automobile.

Prior to the decision in Gant,Indianapolis police detained Dewayne Cartwright for driving a vehicle without a light illuminating the automobile license. He stopped his car in a grocery store parking lot but not in a legal spot. Cartwright was unable to produce a driver’s license and the police were unable to confirm the name he provided. They arrested him for driving without a license and providing a false name. After the arrest and following, then current, Seventh Circuit procedure, prior to Gant, the officers searched the car pursuant to a legal arrest. ¹ A gun was found in the back seat and Cartwright was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He plead guilty, preserving his right to appeal the search of the vehicle, and he was sentenced to 84 months in prison.

Of course under Gant the search would be illegal. But the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the search on inevitable discovery grounds. The Fourth Amendment does not ban all searches occurring without a search warrant. It states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, . . . ” Thus it only prohibits “unreasonable” searches and seizures. As a result the courts have developed a number of exceptions to the warrant requirement. One of those exceptions allows for inventory searches of vehicles prior to their seizure. In order to protect the police from claims of theft of the contents of a vehicle, a city may develop procedures to permit the search and inventory of a vehicle prior to storing a towed vehicle. Indianapolis had a well developed written policy providing for inventory searches. It allowed a vehicle to be searched if the driver was driving without a license and no passenger in the car had a license and is capable of driving the car. Cartwright’s passenger, Ciera Golliday, did not have a license even though she owned the car.

Another approved exception to the warrant requirement is the eventual discovery rule. It provides that evidence is admissible at trial even if it was seized illegally.if law enforcement officers, using their normal procedures, would eventually discover the evidence legally. The Seventh Circuit upheld the search since even though the search was illegal as a search pursuant to an arrest under Gant the gun would have eventually been discovered when the car was inventoried.