PA declines to have broader state constitutional rights under the automobile exception

Pennsylvania declines to have broader state constitutional rights under the automobile exception. (No sign it was going to before.) Commonwealth v. Gary, 2014 Pa. LEXIS 1119 (April 29, 2014) (concurrence; dissent):

Thus, there has been an evolution of the high Court’s jurisprudence concerning the automobile exception to the warrant requirement. While the early holdings of Carroll and Chambers relied on the impracticability of obtaining a warrant for a motor vehicle in transit with contraband or evidence of a crime, more recent cases from the high Court have made clear that the impracticability of obtaining a warrant, unforeseen events, or any other exigent circumstances — beyond the inherent ready mobility of a motor vehicle — are not required for application of the automobile exception to the warrant requirement. As the high Court stated in Dyson, supra at 466-67 (see excerpt quoted in text, supra), since 1982, the only requirement for application of the automobile exception, permitting warrantless search of a motor vehicle under federal law, is a finding of probable cause.

We turn now to Pennsylvania jurisprudence concerning the automobile exception. In some cases from this Court, the defendant’s challenge to a vehicular search and/or seizure was raised only under the Fourth Amendment. In other cases, it is not clear from our opinions whether the defendant’s challenge was grounded in the Fourth Amendment or Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, or both. As we develop infra, the unmistakable implication from our cases until the mid-1990’s is that this Court considered the federal and state Constitutions coterminous with regard to application of the automobile exception to the warrant requirement. See Commonwealth v. Perry, 798 A.2d 697, 708-11 (Pa. 2002) (Castille, J., concurring) (characterizing Commonwealth v. White, 669 A.2d 896 (Pa. 1995), as having “decided the automobile exception question by employing the same coterminous, Fourth Amendment-based construct this Court had developed and followed for years”).