OPINION OF THE COURT
VIRGINIA V. MOORE
553 U. S. ____ (2008)
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
NO. 06-1082
VIRGINIA, PETITIONER
v. DAVID LEE
MOORE
on writ of certiorari to the supreme court of
virginia
[April 23, 2008]
Justice Scalia delivered the
opinion of the Court.
We consider whether a police
officer violates the Fourth Amendment by making an arrest based on
probable cause but prohibited by state law.
I
On February 20, 2003, two City of
Portsmouth police officers stopped a car driven by David Lee Moore.
They had heard over the police radio that a person known as “Chubs”
was driving with a suspended license, and one of the officers knew
Moore by that nickname. The officers determined that Moore’s
license was in fact suspended, and arrested him for the misdemeanor
of driving on a suspended license, which is punishable under
Virginia law by a year in jail and a $2,500 fine, Va. Code Ann.
§§18.2–11, 18.2–272, 46.2–301(C) (Lexis 2005). The officers
subsequently searched Moore and found that he was carrying 16 grams
of crack cocaine and $516 in cash.[
Footnote 1] See 272 Va. 717, 636 S. E. 2d 395 (2006);
45 Va. App. 146, 609 S. E. 2d 74 (2005).
Under state law, the officers
should have issued Moore a summons instead of arresting him.
Driving on a suspended license, like some other misdemeanors, is
not an arrestable offense except as to those who “fail or refuse to
discontinue” the violation, and those whom the officer reasonably
believes to be likely to disregard a summons, or likely to harm
themselves or others. Va. Code Ann. §19.2–74 (Lexis 2004). The
intermediate appellate court found none of these circumstances
applicable, and Virginia did not appeal that determination. See 272
Va., at 720, n. 3, 636 S. E. 2d, at 396–397, n. 3.
Virginia also permits arrest for driving on a suspended license in
jurisdictions where “prior general approval has been granted by
order of the general district court,” Va. Code Ann. §46.2–936;
Virginia has never claimed such approval was in effect in the
county where Moore was arrested.
Moore was charged with possessing cocaine with
the intent to distribute it in violation of Virginia law. He filed
a pretrial motion to suppress the evidence from the arrest search.
Virginia law does not, as a general matter, require suppression of
evidence obtained in violation of state law. See 45 Va. App., at
160–162, 609 S. E. 2d, at 82 (Annunziata, J., dissenting).
Moore argued, however, that suppression was required by the Fourth
Amendment. The trial court denied the motion, and after a bench
trial found Moore guilty of the drug charge and sentenced him to a
5-year prison term, with one year and six months of the sentence
suspended. The conviction was reversed by a panel of Virginia’s
intermediate court on Fourth Amendment grounds,
id., at
149–150, 609 S. E. 2d, at 76, reinstated by the intermediate
court sitting en banc, 47 Va. App. 55, 622 S. E. 2d 253
(2005), and finally reversed again by the Virginia Supreme Court,
272 Va., at 725, 636 S. E. 2d, at 400. The Court reasoned that
since the arresting officers should have issued Moore a citation
under state law, and the Fourth Amendment does not permit search
incident to citation, the arrest search violated the Fourth
Amendment.
Ibid. We granted certiorari. 551 U. S. ___
(2007).
II
The Fourth Amendment protects
“against unreasonable searches and seizures” of (among other
things) the person. In determining whether a search or seizure is
unreasonable, we begin with history. We look to the statutes and
common law of the founding era to determine the norms that the
Fourth Amendment was meant to preserve. See
Wyoming v.
Houghton,
526 U. S. 295, 299
(1999);
Wilson v.
Arkansas,
514 U. S. 927, 931
(1995).
We are aware of no historical
indication that those who ratified the Fourth Amendment understood
it as a redundant guarantee of whatever limits on search and
seizure legislatures might have enacted.[
Footnote 2] The immediate object of the Fourth
Amendment was to prohibit the general warrants and writs of
assistance that English judges had employed against the colonists,
Boyd v.
United States,
116 U. S. 616, 624–627 (1886);
Payton v.
New York, 445 U. S. 573, 583–584
(1980). That suggests, if anything, that founding-era citizens were
skeptical of using the rules for search and seizure set by
government actors as the index of reasonableness.
Joseph Story, among others, saw the Fourth
Amendment as “little more than the affirmance of a great
constitutional doctrine of the common law,” 3 Commentaries on the
Constitution of the United States §1895, p. 748 (1833), which Story
defined in opposition to statutes, see Codification of the Common
Law in The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story 698, 699, 701 (W.
Story ed. 1852). No early case or commentary, to our knowledge,
suggested the Amendment was intended to incorporate subsequently
enacted statutes. None of the early Fourth Amendment cases that
scholars have identified sought to base a constitutional claim on a
violation of a state or federal statute concerning arrest. See
Davies, Recovering the Original Fourth Amendment
, 98 Mich.
L. Rev. 547, 613–614 (1999);[
Footnote 3] see also T. Taylor, Two Studies in
Constitutional Interpretation 44–45 (1969).
Of course such a claim would not have been
available against state officers, since the Fourth Amendment was a
restriction only upon federal power, see
Barron ex rel.
Tiernan v.
Mayor of Baltimore, 7 Pet. 243 (1833). But
early Congresses tied the arrest authority of federal officers to
state laws of arrest. See
United States v.
Di Re,
332 U. S. 581, 589 (1948);
United
States v.
Watson,
423 U. S. 411, 420
(1976). Moreover, even though several state constitutions also
prohibited unreasonable searches and seizures, citizens who claimed
officers had violated state restrictions on arrest did not claim
that the violations also ran afoul of the state
constitutions.[
Footnote 4] The
apparent absence of such litigation is particularly striking in
light of the fact that searches incident to warrantless arrests
(which is to say arrests in which the officer was not insulated
from private suit) were, as one commentator has put it, “taken for
granted” at the founding, Taylor,
supra, at 45, as were
warrantless arrests themselves, Amar, Fourth Amendment First
Principles, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 757, 764 (1994).
There are a number of possible explanations of
why such constitutional claims were not raised. Davies, for
example, argues that actions taken in violation of state law could
not qualify as state action subject to Fourth Amendment
constraints. 98 Mich. L. Rev., at 660–663. Be that as it may,
as Moore adduces neither case law nor commentaries to support his
view that the Fourth Amendment was intended to incorporate
statutes, this is “not a case in which the claimant can point to ‘a
clear answer [that] existed in 1791 and has been generally adhered
to by the traditions of our society ever since.’ ”
Atwater v.
Lago Vista, 532 U. S. 318, 345 (2001) (alteration
in original).
III
A
When history has not provided a
conclusive answer, we have analyzed a search or seizure in light of
traditional standards of reasonableness “by assessing, on the one
hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy
and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the
promotion of legitimate governmental interests.”
Houghton,
526 U. S., at 300; see also
Atwater, 532 U. S., at 346.
That methodology provides no support for Moore’s Fourth Amendment
claim. In a long line of cases, we have said that when an officer
has probable cause to believe a person committed even a minor crime
in his presence, the balancing of private and public interests is
not in doubt. The arrest is constitutionally reasonable.
Id., at 354; see also,
e.g., Devenpeck
v.
Alford, 543 U. S. 146, 152
(2004);
Gerstein v.
Pugh,
420 U. S. 103, 111
(1975);
Brinegar v.
United States,
338 U. S. 160, 164, 170,
175–176 (1949).
Our decisions counsel against
changing this calculus when a State chooses to protect privacy
beyond the level that the Fourth Amendment requires. We have
treated additional protections exclusively as matters of state law.
In
Cooper v.
California, 386 U. S. 58 (1967), we
reversed a state court that had held the search of a seized vehicle
to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment because state law did
not explicitly authorize the search. We concluded that whether
state law authorized the search was irrelevant. States, we said,
remained free “to impose higher standards on searches and seizures
than required by the Federal Constitution,”
id., at 62,
but regardless of state rules, police could search a lawfully
seized vehicle as a matter of federal constitutional law.
In
California v.
Greenwood,
486 U. S. 35
(1988), we held that search of an individual’s garbage forbidden by
California’s Constitution was not forbidden by the Fourth
Amendment. “[W]hether or not a search is reasonable within the
meaning of the Fourth Amendment,” we said, has never “depend[ed] on
the law of the particular State in which the search occurs.”
Id., at 43. While “[i]ndividual States may surely construe
their own constitutions as imposing more stringent constraints on
police conduct than does the Federal Constitution,”
ibid.,
state law did not alter the content of the Fourth Amendment.
We have applied the same principle in the
seizure context.
Whren v.
United States,
517 U. S. 806 (1996),
held that police officers had acted reasonably in stopping a car,
even though their action violated regulations limiting the
authority of plainclothes officers in unmarked vehicles. We thought
it obvious that the Fourth Amendment’s meaning did not change with
local law enforcement practices—even practices set by rule. While
those practices “vary from place to place and from time to time,”
Fourth Amendment protections are not “so variable” and cannot “be
made to turn upon such trivialities.”
Id., at 815.
Some decisions earlier than these excluded
evidence obtained in violation of state law, but those decisions
rested on our supervisory power over the federal courts, rather
than the Constitution. In
Di Re,
332 U. S. 581, federal and state
officers collaborated in an investigation that led to an arrest for
a federal crime. The Government argued that the legality of an
arrest for a federal offense was a matter of federal law.
Id., at 589. We concluded, however, that since Congress
had provided that arrests with warrants must be made in accordance
with state law, the legality of arrests without warrants should
also be judged according to state-law standards.
Id., at
589–590. This was plainly not a rule we derived from the
Constitution, however, because we repeatedly invited Congress to
change it by statute—saying that state law governs the validity of
a warrantless arrest “in [the] absence of an applicable federal
statute
,”
id., at 589, and that the
Di
Re rule applies “except in those cases where Congress has
enacted a federal rule,”
id., at 589–590.
Later decisions did not expand the rule of
Di Re. Johnson v.
United States,
333 U. S. 10
(1948), relied on
Di Re to suppress evidence obtained
under circumstances identical in relevant respects to those in that
case. See 333 U. S., at 12, 15, n. 5. And
Michigan v.
DeFillippo,
443 U. S. 31 (1979),
upheld a warrantless arrest in a case where compliance with state
law was not at issue. While our opinion said that “[w]hether an
officer is authorized to make an arrest ordinarily depends, in the
first instance, on state law,” it also said that a warrantless
arrest satisfies the Constitution so long as the officer has
“probable cause to believe that the suspect has committed or is
committing a crime.”
Id., at 36. We need not pick and
choose among the dicta: Neither
Di Re nor the cases
following it held that violations of state arrest law are also
violations of the Fourth Amendment, and our more recent decisions,
discussed above, have indicated that when States go above the
Fourth Amendment minimum, the Constitution’s protections concerning
search and seizure remain the same.
B
We are convinced that the
approach of our prior cases is correct, because an arrest based on
probable cause serves interests that have long been seen as
sufficient to justify the seizure.
Whren,
supra,
at 817;
Atwater,
supra, at 354. Arrest ensures
that a suspect appears to answer charges and does not continue a
crime, and it safeguards evidence and enables officers to conduct
an in-custody investigation. See W. LaFave, Arrest: The Decision to
Take a Suspect into Custody 177–202 (1965).
Moore argues that a State has no
interest in arrest when it has a policy against arresting for
certain crimes. That is not so, because arrest will still ensure a
suspect’s appearance at trial, prevent him from continuing his
offense, and enable officers to investigate the incident more
thoroughly. State arrest restrictions are more accurately
characterized as showing that the State values its interests in
forgoing arrests more highly than its interests in making them,
see,
e.g., Dept. of Justice, National Institute of
Justice, D. Whitcomb, B. Lewin, & M. Levine, Issues and
Practices: Citation Release 17 (Mar. 1984) (describing cost savings
as a principal benefit of citation-release ordinances); or as
showing that the State places a higher premium on privacy than the
Fourth Amendment requires. A State is free to prefer one
search-and-seizure policy among the range of constitutionally
permissible options, but its choice of a more restrictive option
does not render the less restrictive ones unreasonable, and hence
unconstitutional.
If we concluded otherwise, we would often
frustrate rather than further state policy. Virginia chooses to
protect individual privacy and dignity more than the Fourth
Amendment requires, but it also chooses not to attach to violations
of its arrest rules the potent remedies that federal courts have
applied to Fourth Amendment violations. Virginia does not, for
example, ordinarily exclude from criminal trials evidence obtained
in violation of its statutes. See 45 Va. App., at 161, 609
S. E. 2d, at 82 (Annunziata, J., dissenting) (citing
Janis v.
Commonwealth, 22 Va. App. 646, 651, 472
S. E. 2d 649, 652 (1996)). Moore would allow Virginia to
accord enhanced protection against arrest only on pain of
accompanying that protection with federal remedies for Fourth
Amendment violations, which often include the exclusionary rule.
States unwilling to lose control over the remedy would have to
abandon restrictions on arrest altogether. This is an odd
consequence of a provision designed to protect against searches and
seizures.
Even if we thought that state law changed the
nature of the Commonwealth’s interests for purposes of the Fourth
Amendment, we would adhere to the probable-cause standard. In
determining what is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, we have
given great weight to the “essential interest in readily
administrable rules.”
Atwater, 532 U. S., at 347. In
Atwater, we acknowledged that nuanced judgments about the
need for warrantless arrest were desirable, but we nonetheless
declined to limit to felonies and disturbances of the peace the
Fourth Amendment rule allowing arrest based on probable cause to
believe a law has been broken in the presence of the arresting
officer.
Id., at 346–347
. The rule extends even
to minor misdemeanors, we concluded, because of the need for a
bright-line constitutional standard. If the constitutionality of
arrest for minor offenses turned in part on inquiries as to risk of
flight and danger of repetition, officers might be deterred from
making legitimate arrests.
Id., at 351. We found little to
justify this cost, because there was no “epidemic of unnecessary
minor-offense arrests,” and hence “a dearth of horribles demanding
redress.”
Id., at 353.
Incorporating state-law arrest limitations
into the Constitution would produce a constitutional regime no less
vague and unpredictable than the one we rejected in
Atwater. The constitutional standard would be only as easy
to apply as the underlying state law, and state law can be
complicated indeed. The Virginia statute in this case, for example,
calls on law enforcement officers to weigh just the sort of
case-specific factors that
Atwater said would deter
legitimate arrests if made part of the constitutional inquiry. It
would authorize arrest if a misdemeanor suspect fails or refuses to
discontinue the unlawful act, or if the officer believes the
suspect to be likely to disregard a summons. Va. Code Ann.
§19.2–74.A.1.
Atwater specifically noted the “extremely
poor judgment” displayed in arresting a local resident who would
“almost certainly” have discontinued the offense and who had “no
place to hide and no incentive to flee.” 532 U. S., at 346–347. It
nonetheless declined to make those considerations part of the
constitutional calculus.
Atwater differs from this case in
only one significant respect: It considered (and rejected) federal
constitutional remedies for
all minor-misdemeanor arrests;
Moore seeks them in only that
subset of minor-misdemeanor
arrests in which there is the least to be gained—that is, where the
State has already acted to constrain officers’ discretion and
prevent abuse. Here we confront fewer horribles than in
Atwater, and less of a need for redress.
Finally, linking Fourth Amendment protections
to state law would cause them to “vary from place to place and from
time to time,”
Whren, 517 U. S., at 815. Even at the same
place and time, the Fourth Amendment’s protections might vary if
federal officers were not subject to the same statutory constraints
as state officers. In
Elkins v.
United States,
364 U. S. 206,
210–212 (1960), we noted the practical difficulties posed by the
“silver-platter doctrine,” which had imposed more stringent
limitations on federal officers than on state police acting
independent of them. It would be strange to construe a
constitutional provision that did not apply to the States at all
when it was adopted to now restrict state officers more than
federal officers, solely because the States have passed
search-and-seizure laws that are the prerogative of independent
sovereigns.
We conclude that warrantless arrests for
crimes committed in the presence of an arresting officer are
reasonable under the Constitution, and that while States are free
to regulate such arrests however they desire, state restrictions do
not alter the Fourth Amendment’s protections.
IV
Moore argues that even if the
Constitution allowed his arrest, it did not allow the arresting
officers to search him. We have recognized, however, that officers
may perform searches incident to constitutionally permissible
arrests in order to ensure their safety and safeguard evidence.
United States v.
Robinson,
414 U. S. 218 (1973). We
have described this rule as covering any “lawful arrest,”
id., at 235, with constitutional law as the reference
point. That is to say, we have equated a lawful arrest with an
arrest based on probable cause: “A custodial arrest of a suspect
based on probable cause is a reasonable intrusion under the Fourth
Amendment;
that intrusion being lawful, a search incident
to the arrest requires no additional justification.”
Ibid.
(emphasis added). Moore correctly notes that several important
state-court decisions have defined the lawfulness of arrest in
terms of compliance with state law. See Brief for Respondent 32–33
(citing
People v.
Chiagles, 237 N. Y. 193,
197, 142 N. E. 583, 584 (1923);
People v.
DeFore, 242 N. Y. 13, 17–19, 150 N. E. 585, 586
(1926)). But it is not surprising that States have used “lawful” as
shorthand for compliance with state law, while our constitutional
decision in
Robinson used “lawful” as shorthand for
compliance with constitutional constraints.
The interests justifying search
are present whenever an officer makes an arrest. A search enables
officers to safeguard evidence, and, most critically, to ensure
their safety during “the extended exposure which follows the taking
of a suspect into custody and transporting him to the police
station.”
Robinson, supra, at 234–235. Officers issuing
citations do not face the same danger, and we therefore held in
Knowles v.
Iowa,
525 U. S. 113 (1998),
that they do not have the same authority to search. We cannot agree
with the Virginia Supreme Court that
Knowles controls
here. The state officers
arrested Moore, and therefore
faced the risks that are “an adequate basis for treating all
custodial arrests alike for purposes of search justification.”
Robinson, supra, at 235.
The Virginia Supreme Court may have concluded
that
Knowles required the exclusion of evidence seized
from Moore because, under state law, the officers who arrested
Moore should have issued him a citation instead. This argument
might have force if the Constitution forbade Moore’s arrest,
because we have sometimes excluded evidence obtained through
unconstitutional methods in order to deter constitutional
violations. See
Wong Sun v.
United States,
371 U. S. 471,
484–485, 488 (1963)
. But the arrest rules that the
officers violated were those of state law alone, and as we have
just concluded, it is not the province of the Fourth Amendment to
enforce state law. That Amendment does not require the exclusion of
evidence obtained from a constitutionally permissible arrest.
* * *
We reaffirm against a novel
challenge what we have signaled for more than half a century. When
officers have probable cause to believe that a person has committed
a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to
make an arrest, and to search the suspect in order to safeguard
evidence and ensure their own safety. The judgment of the Supreme
Court of Virginia is reversed, and the case is remanded for further
proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Footnote 1
The arresting officers did not perform a
search incident to arrest immediately upon taking Moore into
custody, because each of them mistakenly believed that the other
had done so. App. 54–55; see also
id., at 33–34. They
realized their mistake after arriving with Moore at Moore’s hotel
room, which they had obtained his consent to search, and they
searched his person there.
Ibid. Moore does not contend
that this delay violated the Fourth Amendment.
Footnote 2
Atwater v.
Lago Vista,
532 U. S. 318 (2001), rejected the
view Justice Ginsburg advances that the legality of arrests for
misdemeanors involving no breach of the peace “depended on
statutory authorization.”
Post, at 1, n. 1 (opinion
concurring in judgment).
Atwater cited both of the sources
on which Justice Ginsburg relies for a limited view of common-law
arrest authority, but it also identified and quoted numerous
treatises that described common-law authority to arrest for minor
misdemeanors without limitation to cases in which a statute
authorized arrest. See 532 U. S., at 330–332.
Atwater
noted that many statutes authorized arrest for misdemeanors other
than breaches of the peace, but it concluded that the view of
arrest authority as extending beyond breaches of the peace also
reflected judge-made common law.
Id., at 330–331.
Particularly since
Atwater considered the materials on
which Justice Ginsburg relies, we see no reason to revisit the
case’s conclusion.
Footnote 3
Of the early cases that Davies collects, see
98 Mich. L. Rev., at 613, n. 174;
id., at 614, n.
175, the lone decision to treat statutes as relevant to the Fourth
Amendment’s contours simply applied the principle that statutes
enacted in the years immediately before or after the Amendment was
adopted shed light on what citizens at the time of the Amendment’s
enactment saw as reasonable.
Boyd v.
United
States,
116 U. S. 616, 622–623 (1886).
Footnote 4
Massachusetts, for example, had a state
constitutional provision paralleling the Fourth Amendment, but the
litigants in the earliest cases we have identified claiming
violations of arrest statutes in the Commonwealth did not argue
that their arrests violated the Commonwealth’s Constitution. See
Brock v.
Stimson, 108 Mass. 520 (1871);
Phillips v.
Fadden, 125 Mass. 198 (1878); see
also
Tubbs v.
Tukey, 57 Mass. 438 (1849)
(asserting violation of state common law concerning arrest but not
asserting violation of state constitution).
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