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
*305 MR. Justice Brennan,
dissenting in part.
Without effecting an arrest, and without first seeking to obtain a search warrant from a magistrate, the police decided to scrape respondent’s fingernails for destructible evidence. In upholding this search, the Court engrafts another, albeit limited, exception on the warrant requirement. Before we take the serious step of legitimating even limited searches merely upon probable cause — without a warrant or as incident to an arrest — we ought first be certain that such probable cause in fact existed. Here, as my Brother Douglas convincingly demonstrates “[w]hether there was or was not probable cause is difficult to determine on this record.” Ante, at 301. And, since the Court of Appeals did not consider that question, the proper course would be to remand to that court so that it might decide in the first instance whether there was probable cause to arrest or search. There is simply no need for this Court to decide, upon a disputed record and at this stage of the litigation, whether the instant search would be permissible if probable cause existed.