The Court of Appeals Weighs in on Vehicle Searches after Gant

The court of appeals released a batch of opinions yesterday. Several are interesting and important, and there were an unusually large number of opinions in favor of defendants, including some in very serious cases. One of those is State v. Carter, the court's first stab at applying Arizona v. Gant -- a case about which I've blogged here and elsewhere. Recall that the basic holding of Gant is that when police arrest an occupant of a motor vehicle, they can only search the passenger compartment of the vehicle incident to the arrest if (1) the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the vehicle, or (2) there is reason to believe that evidence of the crime of arrest will be found in the vehicle. The defendant in Carter was stopped by an officer who suspected that Carter's temporary tags were expired. It turned out that they were, and that the address on the tags and the address on Carter's license didn't match. For a couple of reasons, including that Carter seemed nervous, the officer decided to arrest him for the tag violation and for failing to notify the DMV of his new address. The officer then searched Carter's vehicle incident to the arrest, and noticed that some papers that had been sitting on the front passenger seat when he first pulled Carter over had been torn into pieces in the interim. The officer seized the papers, which included credit card documents not in Carter's name. The discovery of the papers [...]