Oregon limits inventory searches of personal containers in vehicles

Defendant was stopped for not signaling a turn, and the officer found she was driving on a suspended license. The car was being impounded, and defendant was permitted to remove her stuff from the car first. In the inventory, a zippered pouch was found in the door, and the officer opened it and found paraphernalia. The appellate court said that it was not subject to inventory. State v. Nordloh, 208 Ore. App. 309, 144 P.3d 1013 (September 27, 2006):

The power to inventory a vehicle’s contents exists only pursuant to a properly authorized policy. Whether the policy itself is properly authorized does not depend on the circumstances of the application of the policy to a particular defendant. It instead depends on the reasonable relationship between the conduct permitted under the policy and the government’s interests in protecting property, eliminating false claims, and preventing injury. See State v. Willhite, 110 Ore. App. 567, 572, 824 P.2d 419 (1992). No such reasonable relationship exists in this case.

Were we to accept the state’s argument in the context of inventories of impounded vehicles, Atkinson ‘s requirement that inventories be conducted pursuant to a properly authorized policy would be rendered meaningless. Policymakers could simply eliminate officer discretion by requiring plainly unconstitutional searches of every nook and cranny of a vehicle. See Eldridge, 207 Ore. App. at 342-43 (holding invalid an inventory policy that required vehicles to be “completely [*8] searched and inventoried” because it “lack[ed] standardized criteria or procedures that properly prevent officer discretion and limit each inventory to a scope that is a constitutionally administrative action rather than a warrantless search”); Willhite, 110 Ore. App. at 574 (“To approve a policy because it is so general that an officer must look everywhere he can think of flies in the face of the requirement that the inventory be conducted according to standardized criteria or established routine.” (Internal quotation marks and citations omitted; emphasis in original)). That would violate Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution because the constitutional right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure does not arise on the courthouse steps only after an illegal search has been conducted–the right exists to ensure that persons are secure in their property at all times. While “[i]t is not our function to decide as a matter of policy how, and for what purpose, automobiles or other private property that come into official custody should be examined,” we are charged with assuring that the policies and procedures adopted to inventory vehicles do not violate constitutional guarantees. Atkinson, 298 Ore. at 6. Because the Grants Pass DPS inventory policy requires an officer to open all closed containers in an impounded vehicle, it is not reasonably related to protecting property or eliminating false claims, and thus the purported inventory in this case pursuant to the policy was in fact a warrantless and nonconsensual search that required suppression of the evidence.

Comment: The Oregon rule is more protective of individual privacy that the majority rule.