Willie Gene Davis, Petitioner v. United States (564 U.S. 229)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 16, 2011 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 564 U.S. 229 · 131 S. Ct. 2419
- Decided
- June 16, 2011
- Term
- October Term 2010
- Vote
- 7–2
- Majority author
- Justice Alito
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Alito delivered the opinion of the Court. The Fourth Amendment protects the right, to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but it is silent about how this right is to be enforced. To supplement the bare text, this Court created the exclusionary rule, a deterrent sanction that bars the prosecution from introducing evidence obtained by way of a Fourth Amendment violation. The question here is whether to apply this sanction when the police conduct a search in compliance with binding precedent that is later overruled. Because suppression would do nothing to deter police misconduct in these circumstances, and because it would come at a high cost to both the truth and the public safety, we hold that searches conducted in objectively reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent are not subject to the exclusionary rule. > — Í The question presented arises in this case as a result of a shift in our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence on searches of automobiles incident to arrests of recent occupants. A Under this Court’s decision in Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752 (1969), a police officer who makes a lawful arrest may conduct a warrantless search of the arrestee’s person and the area “within his immediate control.” Id., at 763 (internal quotation marks omitted). This rule “may be stated clearly enough,” but in the early going after Chimel it proved difficult…
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