If you are in Kansas, you would be wise to be sure everyone sits up straight in your car and that you don’t have any small plastic bags in sight. That is unless you don’t mind having your car searched without a warrant. Because if you do have passengers reclining and a plastic bag or two in view, the police have the right to assume a crime has been committed and can search your vehicle without a warrant according to the Kansas Supreme Court.
A car with a reclined passenger seat and a torn plastic bag in the center console can be searched by police at any time without a warrant under a divided Kansas Supreme Court ruling issued on Friday. The high court majority concluded that these two factors, taken together, were enough to establish a belief that Cameron Howard was involved in a crime on September 15, 2011, when he was spotted pulling into a gas station in Prairie Village.
Sort of scary, isn’t it? And it’s an invitation for police to use other non-reasons to force a search of your car.
“Officer Loughman made the reasonable inference that the passenger’s reclined seat was an attempt to conceal something from his view,” the majority wrote. “This inference increased the likelihood that there was contraband in Howard’s vehicle and was an appropriate consideration in establishing probable cause to search the car.”
To show how ridiculous this is, don’t all cars have some combination of glove compartments, center console compartments, or trunks? If a reclined seat can be considered evidence of hiding contraband, should the ownership of a car with a trunk or a truck with tool chest imply the same thing?
Although the majority issued this weird ruling, some comfort can be drawn from the fact that there were judges on that court who dissented.
Because the passenger, not the driver, reclined her seat, Justice Rosen argued that she just as easily could have reclined the seat to make herself more comfortable — she was visibly pregnant at the time. The dissent noted that there is no case law supporting a search based solely on a torn baggie and a police officer’s experience.
“Nor did anyone produce a case in which something as innocuous and innocent as a torn plastic baggie could transform a similarly innocent activity — reclining a seat — into something suspicious enough to establish probable cause,” Justice Rosen wrote. “And, perhaps most importantly, either decision would all but destroy any protection still provided by the Fourth Amendment’s assurance that we are free from an unreasonable search of our vehicles. For these reasons, I would conclude that there was not probable cause to search Howard’s car.”
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The officer testified from his “training and experience” that torn plastic bags are often used to transport drugs, so the presence of a baggie also helped establish reasonable suspicion. Combined with the reclined seat, the majority concluded that there was a “fair probability” that the vehicle contained evidence of a crime. Justices Eric S. Rosen and Lee A. Johnson disagreed with this reasoning.
“The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Section 15 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights establishes ‘the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches,'” Justice Rosen wrote in his dissent. “So long as these principles stand, I cannot agree that the presence of a reclined seat and a torn plastic baggie give an officer permission to invade the privacy and protection afforded by our constitutions with a warrantless search of a vehicle.”
In Kansas it just appears to have become evidence that a crime has been committed if you eat lunch in your car and then recline to take a nap. Has the state run out of criminals to pursue that its police must busy themselves on such ridiculous and unconstitutional pursuits?
Source: The Newspaper
I want to know if they found anything?
Just rotten cops and judges.