Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Fourth Amendment

Criminal Law

: Fourth Amendment

MA: Search incident 30+ minutes after arrest was not contemporaneous under Chimel and Belton

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Massachusetts holds that the comtemporaniety requirement of the search incident doctrine requires that the search occur reasonable close to the time of the arrest. Where the search of a bag on the defendant was more than 30 minutes after the arrest, it was not contemporaneous. "The case law interpreting the Fourth Amendment demonstrates, however, that the contemporaneity requirement continues to have meaning. Accordingly, this case, where the search did not occur at the time or at the place of arrest, has surely crossed that line." Commonwealth v. Pierre, 2008 Mass. App. LEXIS 931 (September 12, 2008): The bounds of the temporal requirement of contemporaneity of the search with the arrest were tested in United States v. Chadwick, supra. There, at a Federal detention facility an hour and one half after the defendants' arrests, Federal agents searched a footlocker that had been found in the trunk of an automobile near the defendants when they were arrested...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on September 13, 2008 (boomark / email).