Drivetime Mahatma

'Step out of the car': Who says?

Dear Mahatma: Do the police have the right if they stop you to make you get out of the car? It's my understanding that you must have your driver's license, proof of insurance and title info, but what else can they make you do? -- Robert

Dear Robert: Juan Reyes is a training supervisor at the Arkansas Law Enforcement Training Academy in East Camden. Seemed to us that the academy where new police officers are trained would be a good place to pitch the question. About this, we were right. Reyes pointed us in all the right directions.

The matter has to do with two things: Officer safety and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects us against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Who gets to decide what is safe or unsafe, unreasonable or reasonable? The courts. Lots of courts, but the U.S. Supreme Court generally gets final say on such Bill of Rights things.

Reyes cited three Supreme Court opinions, the first being Pennsylvania v. Mimms from 1977. We'll stick with this one for purposes of simplicity and space.

Mr. Mimms was driving around Pennsylvania with an expired license plate. He was stopped by the police, one of whom asked Mimms to step out of the car. The plot immediately thickened, as the Supreme Court subsequently explained.

"As respondent alighted, a large bulge under his jacket was noticed by the officer, who thereupon frisked him and found a loaded revolver."

Oops. The guy was arrested and charged with carrying a concealed weapon without a license to do so. He was later convicted. His appeal was successful at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where the conviction was reversed on the ground that the revolver was seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, those folks had a different opinion, and held the following:

First, that the order to get out of the car, after the person was legally detained, was reasonable and so was permitted under the Fourth Amendment. The state's justification for asking Mimms to step out -- the safety of the police officer -- was both legitimate and weighty, and "the intrusion into respondent's personal liberty occasioned by the order being, at most, a mere inconvenience, cannot prevail when balanced against legitimate concerns for the officer's safety."

Second, that the facts available to the officer at the moment of the search or seizure "warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief" that the action was proper. And the officer was justified in making the search once he saw the bulge in Mimms' jacket.

The court explained the heart of the matter: The reasonableness of any search depends on a balance between the public interest and the individual's right to personal security free from arbitrary interference by the law.

Thus ends today's legal lesson. Our fee is $300 an hour, cash only.

Mahatma@arkansasonline.com

Metro on 11/28/2015

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