{"id":3661,"date":"2010-02-07T08:21:45","date_gmt":"2009-12-22T07:42:07","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-22T07:42:07","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=3661","title":{"rendered":"MA: Inventory of closed container within closed container valid | Search of pill bottle for weapon unreasonable"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c[T]he opening of the closed but unlocked box within the closed but unlocked book bag did not exceed the scope of the inventory policy.\u201d Commonwealth v. Allen<\/a>, 76 Mass. App. Ct. 21, 918 N.E.2d 475 (2009).<\/p>\n

Search of a pill bottle for weapons in a frisk of the car was unreasonable. Commonwealth v. Cruz-Rivera<\/a>, 76 Mass. App. Ct. 14, 918 N.E.2d 471 (2009):<\/p>\n

But even if one assumes that the police did properly search the car’s interior, they exceeded constitutional limits when Officer Berube opened the small pill bottle he found in the vehicle’s center console. While it is true that Officer Berube and Officer Gaudet both had been informed in various ways about the existence of very small weapons, such as single-shot pen-sized guns, knives, or razors, a limited search of an automobile in which the police are about to allow the operator to drive off cannot be justified solely by police knowledge that small weapons exist and conceivably can be stored in small containers. Instead, such a search, if proper at all, must be “reasonably designed” to uncover threatening weapons, a concept that requires consideration of all the circumstances, including the likelihood that a weapon of some kind may be present and the threat the weapon may pose under the circumstances. For example, the high likelihood that the trunk of every car contains a jack handle, dangerous when used as a club, does not justify the routine search of the trunk of every car the police detain. <\/p>\n

Contrary to the motion judge’s findings, there was no evidence that pill-bottle sized weapons had “proliferated” nor was there evidence that the defendant had a specific history of using tiny weapons. On this record, it simply was not reasonable to believe that the defendant might, upon his release with a message that he was free to go, enter his car, reach into the console, open a pill bottle, extract a weapon smaller than four and one-half inches by one and three-fourths inches and use it in an effort to harm the two nearby, fully armed police officers who had just released him. Indeed, allowing police to search the pill bottle under the circumstances this record reveals would, as a practical matter, essentially remove most constitutional brakes on police power to search the contents of motor vehicles stopped for routine traffic incidents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}