Schneckloth v. Bustamonte (1973)

Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218 (1973), is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court overruled a ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and [Page 555]decided that the state did not need to prove that a defendant knew of a right to refuse prior to giving consent to a warrantless search.

The 6–3 decision, written by Justice Potter Stewart, arose out of a consensual search of a car in which Robert Bustamonte was riding. After police stopped the car for a burned-out headlight and license plate light, a fellow passenger, Joe Alcala (a brother of the vehicle's owner), granted permission for police to search the vehicle, which resulted in the discovery of three stolen checks that were used to convict Bustamonte of unlawfully possessing a check. After Bustamonte's conviction, the Ninth Circuit overturned a federal district court and granted habeas corpus review in which it decided that the state had failed to prove that Alcala had known he had the right to withhold consent to the search. Merle R. Schneckloth, California Conservation Center superintendent, petitioned the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari.

In overturning the Ninth Circuit's decision, Stewart decided that the Court would continue to ascertain the voluntariness of consent through an examination of the totality of the circumstances rather than through an examination of the defendant's subjective understanding of his or her rights. Stewart observed that the test of voluntariness had largely arisen from examinations of confessions, and he had considered circumstances, such as youth, lack of education, low intelligence, deprivation of sleep, and so on. In such a case, the failure of police to advise defendants of their right not to consent had not been “the sine qua non of an effective consent” (Schneckloth). It would be nearly impossible for the state to establish “the nature of a person's subjective understanding,” and it would be “thoroughly impractical to impose on the normal consent search the detailed requirements of an effective warning.” He further noted that the situation of the case at hand was “far removed from ‘custodial interrogation’” like that of Miranda v. Arizona (1966), where the Court had mandated such warnings. In cases such as Bumper v. North Carolina (1968) and Zap v. United States (1946), the Court had been content to make sure that police had not used “threats or force.” The Court had used the more stringent requirement “of a knowing and intelligent waiver” only when these were necessary to preserve a “fair trial,” cases far removed from those involving the Fourth Amendment: “The protections of the Fourth Amendment are of a wholly different order, and have nothing whatever to do with promoting the fair ascertainment of truth at a criminal trial.” Requirement of a knowing waiver would further be inconsistent with the Court's existing approach to third-party consent searches.

Stu's Views

© Stu All Rights Reserved http://www.STUS.com

Justice Harry Blackmun concurred but indicated that he was not specifically reconsidering the Court's decision in Kaufman v. United States (1969), in which the Court had allowed collateral habeas corpus (i.e., an appeal on grounds of constitutional rights that had not been raised in the original case). By contrast, Justice Lewis Powell and two fellow justices argued that Kaufman should be overturned. In an extensive review of habeas corpus law, Powell argued that, absent a concern over an unjust conviction, the federal courts should limit such review to the issue of whether state courts had considered procedural issues rather than constituting a second look by federal courts of this issue. Citing decisions by Justice Hugo Black as well as the Court's failure in Linkletter v. Walker (1965) to apply the exclusionary rule, which excludes illegally obtained evidence from trial, retroactively, Powell thought collateral review otherwise did little to deter illegal police conduct.

...