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 Powell,
with whom The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Rehnquist join, concurring.
In this case the District Court and the Court of Appeals entertained a habeas corpus attack upon a state court conviction on the ground that the evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment had been wrongly admitted at the state trial. For the reasons set forth in my concurring opinion in Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, ante, p. 250, I think a claim such as this is properly available in federal habeas corpus only to the extent of ascertaining whether the prisoner was afforded a fair opportunity to raise and have adjudicated the question in state courts. The Court today, however, reaches the merits of the respondent’s Fourth Amendment claim, and on the merits I join the Court’s opinion.