New York v. Belton
United States Supreme Court case
New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that when a police officer has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, the officer may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of that automobile. Therefore, Belton extended the so-called "Chimel rule" of searches incident to a lawful arrest, established in Chimel v. California (1969), to vehicles. The Supreme Court sought to establish bright line rules to govern vehicle search incident to eliminate some confusion in the cases.
Background
A New York State Police trooper stopped a speeding car. No one in the car knew the owner. The officer could smell marijuana, and he saw an envelope on the floor marked "Supergold" which he could see probably contained marijuana. He ordered the occupants out of the car and arrested them. He patted them down and then directed them to stand apart.
“New York v. Belton” enters the record as united States Supreme Court case. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what York, Belton and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “New York v. Belton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.