while police investigating informant’s tip that defendant would be driving from Limestone to Bangor and making an overnight trip to buy drugs placed defendant under surveillance and corroborated much of informant’s details, they could not predict with reasonable certainty that they could get a warrant, because not until defendant was seen driving back from Bangor on last portion of road leading to Limestone that probable cause crystallized
How later courts described this case
- while police investigating informant’s tip that defendant would be driving from Limestone to Bangor and making an overnight trip to buy drugs placed defendant under surveillance and corroborated much of informant’s details, they could not predict with reasonable certainty that they could get a warrant, because not until defendant was seen driving back from Bangor on last portion of road leading to Limestone that probable cause crystallized
- "[W]e hold that a warrantless search of a vehicle for contraband, that is constitutionally permissible under the long-established ‘automobile exception,’ may be validly extended to a container, found in the vehicle, that is capable of containing the contraband. In this regard we find no reason to construe article I, section 5 of the State Constitution any differently than the fourth amendment of the federal constitution."
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
NICHOLS, Justice,
dissenting.
I cannot join today’s majority.
All we have before us is an Agreed Statement of Facts upon which the parties chose to pursue this appeal. We examine that sparse statement in vain for any showing of “at least some countervailing factors” which might make this occasion truly an exigency. Niro v. United States, 388 F.2d 535, 539 (1st Cir.1968). The burden is on those seeking an exception from the warrant requirement to show the need for the exception. United States v. Jeffers, 342 U.S. 48, 51 , 72 S.Ct. 93, 95 , 96 L.Ed. 59 (1951). The State has not met that burden here.
Therefore, I would affirm the order of suppression.