Delayed Probable Cause Searches

Under the Fourth Amendment, probable cause is needed for a search; however, probable cause to search, like the authority of warrants that are issued, does not last beyond the circumstances that justified the original probable cause. Suspicion, such as that the U.S. Supreme Court used to justify a stop and frisk in Terry v. Ohio (1968), that individuals are casing a store today would thus not provide adequate justification for similar action under completely different circumstances tomorrow. Just as it is common to exclude evidence from search warrants that are not executed within a given number of days, so, too, the time in which a search justified by probable cause can be executed will have an end point, after which the evidence seized will not be admissible at trial. However, in some cases, a delayed probable cause search has been considered legal under the Fourth Amendment.

In Chambers v. Maroney (1970), the Court upheld a search of a car at a police station within an hour after it had been brought from the scene of a robbery of a service station. Similarly, in Texas v. White (1975), the Court upheld a delayed probable cause search of a car that was conducted at a police station where police had driven the car rather than at the place of arrest, but the search was fairly contemporaneous with the arrest, and two dissenting justices still thought that it had not been carried out in a timely fashion. By contrast, in Mincey v. Arizona (1978), the Court held that [Page 209]there was no general murder scene exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment that would enable police to stay at a murder scene at an apartment for four days without a warrant.