US courts of appeals and state supreme court responses to Arizona v. Gant: a study in judicial impact

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a judicial impact study of the 2009 Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. Gant, which modified the rules police have to follow when conducting vehicle searches incident to arrest. Following up on an earlier study, this research draws on principal-agent theory to consider the differences between the responses of US courts of appeals panels to Gant with decisions of state supreme courts and attempts to understand why defendants win on Gant issues 44% of the time in state supreme courts, compared with 15% of the time in the US courts of appeals. A detailed content analysis of the opinions in 102 appellate courts decisions in which Gant could have potentially served as a controlling precedent revealed an interesting set of differences between state and federal courts. Federal judges were more likely than state supreme court justices to actively seek alternative rationales that allowed them to avoid the exclusionary rule.

Keywords:

• judicial impact
• Arizona v. Gant
• search and seizure
• vehicle searches
• US Courts of Appeals
• state supreme courts

1. One anomaly in this seeming tide of cases that expanded the power of the police to search a car pretty much whenever they wanted was the case of Knowles v. Iowa (1998). In that case, the police had stopped Knowles for speeding, issued a citation, and then proceeded to search the car without consent or a warrant, finding illegal drugs. The unanimous opinion of the Court was that the search was not justified as a search incident to arrest because Knowles was not under full custodial arrest at the time of the search. The opinion, written by Justice Rehnquist, was notable in that it tested the validity of the search against the two prong standard set out in United States v. Robinson (1973) and ultimately used in the Gant decision.

2. The matter of discarding cases is deserving of clarification. Those five cases that were discarded were left out of the dataset because the decision made by the court in question did not hinge on an interpretation of the Gant decision. For example, there were two courts of appeals decisions (United States v. Ferguson 2010 and United States v. Jackson 2009) in which defendants claimed that their counsel failed to raise Gant arguments, even though their cases occurred as much as five years before Gant was decided. These were not search and seizure cases. These were Sixth Amendment cases.