United States v. Johnson

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The Ninth Circuit affirmed defendant's conviction and sentence for drug and firearms offenses. In this case, defendant was stopped while driving and subjected to a warrantless search of his person and car. A year later, a separate investigation linked defendant with a controlled substances distribution and the police conducted a warrant search of his home.The panel held that the search of defendant's person was constitutional based on the search incident to a lawful arrest exception to the warrant requirement. The panel reasoned that the justifications for the search incident to lawful arrest exception do not lose any of their force in the context of a search performed by an officer who has probable cause to arrest and shortly thereafter does arrest. So long as the search was incident to and preceding a lawful arrest—which is to say that probable cause to arrest existed and the search and arrest are roughly contemporaneous—the arresting officer's subjective crime of arrest need not have been the crime for which probable cause existed. The panel held that Knowles v. Iowa, 525 U.S. 113 (1998), does not prevent a search incident to a lawful arrest from occurring before the arrest itself, even if the crime of arrest is different from the crime for which probable cause existed.The panel also held that the search of the defendant's vehicle was justified under the automobile exception and the warrant to search the house was valid. Finally, the district court did not abuse its discretion in applying a sentencing enhancement for the use of body armor during the commission of the offense. View "United States v. Johnson" on Justia Law