Pennsylvania v. Edwin Labron (518 U.S. 938)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided July 1, 1996 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 518 U.S. 938 · 116 S. Ct. 2485
- Decided
- July 1, 1996
- Term
- October Term 1995
- Vote
- 7–2
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Per Curiam. In these two cases, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that the Fourth Amendment, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth, requires police to obtain a warrant before searching an automobile unless exigent circumstances are present. Because the holdings rest on an incorrect reading of the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, we grant the petitions for certiorari and reverse. In Labron, No. 95-1691, police observed respondent La-bron and others engaging in a series of drug transactions on a street in Philadelphia. The police arrested the suspects, searched the trunk of a car from which the drugs had been produced, and found bags containing cocaine. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed with the trial court (but not with the intermediate court of appeals, 428 Pa. Super. 616, 626 A. 2d 646 (1993), whose judgment it reversed) that this evidence should be suppressed. 543 Pa. 86, 669 A. 2d 917 (1995). After surveying our precedents on the automobile exception as well as some of its own decisions, the court “conclude [d] that this Commonwealth’s jurisprudence of the automobile exception has long required both the existence of probable cause and the presence of exigent circumstances to justify a warrantless search.” Id., at 100, 669 A. 2d, at 924. Satisfied the police had time to secure a warrant, id., at 100-103, 699 A. 2d, at…
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