determining, in accordance with Chimel, that a limited search to “preserve the highly evanescent evidence” under a detainee’s fingernails to be appropriate, agreeing with the Court “that exigent circumstances existed making it likely that the fingernail scrapings ... might vanish if [the detainee] were free to move about”
How later courts described this case
- determining, in accordance with Chimel, that a limited search to “preserve the highly evanescent evidence” under a detainee’s fingernails to be appropriate, agreeing with the Court “that exigent circumstances existed making it likely that the fingernail scrapings ... might vanish if [the detainee] were free to move about”
- explaining that a search that goes “beyond mere physical 12 characteristics . . . constantly exposed to the public . . . constitute[s] the type of severe, though brief, 13 intrusion upon cherished personal security that is subject to constitutional scrutiny” (internal citation 14 and quotation marks omitted)
- holding that the "ready destructibility of the evidence" and the suspect's observed efforts to destroy it "justified the police in subjecting him to the very limited search," the scraping of his fingernails, which was "necessary to preserve the highly evanescent evidence they found under his fingernails"
- holding that, unlike fingerprints and voice or handwriting exemplars, the warrantless search of the defendant's fingernails went beyond mere physical characteristics constantly exposed to the public and constituted the type of intrusion upon personal security that is subject to constitutional scrutiny
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Mr. Justice Blackmun,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, concurring.
The Court today permits a search for evidence without an arrest but under circumstances where probable cause for an arrest existed, where the officers had reasonable cause to believe that the evidence was on respondent’s person, and where that evidence was highly destructible. The Court, however, restricts the permissible quest to “the very limited search necessary to preserve the highly evanescent evidence they found under [respondent’s] fingernails.”
While I join the Court’s opinion, I do so with the understanding that what the Court says here applies only where no arrest has been made. Far different factors, in my view, govern the permissible scope of a search incident to a lawful arrest.