this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Luigi Mangione
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Not a lawyer, but I know that when a cop arrests someone in a car and the car is impounded, they catalog items. This is an unofficial search to make sure they aren't liable for missing items. I would expect the same of a backpack. But perhaps that falls under the same disqualification of use as evidence you're suggesting.
That's called an "inventory search", and this motion says what happened isn't an "inventory search" because they didn't follow procedure (and cites supporting precedence).
If they would have just hauled him in for processing on the false identification, and then found the gun during an inventory search at the station, it would be better for the prosecution.
The motion also claims that the search couldn't be a... safety search? (I don't know the right term)... like checking a person for weapons, because before the search was initiated, the suspect was already handcuffed and separated from the backpack so didn't have access to anything in it that could be hazardous to the officers. Prosecution might argue is was a safety search because they were looking for a hazard that didn't need to be triggered by the suspect, like a timed device or just an incidental hazard.
IANAL, just an interested citizen.
You're thinking of a Terry stop.
That would be the exigent circumstances exception, but you need more than just an assertion for that; you need a rational basis for claiming exigent circumstances.
Under Illinois v. Lafayette, 462 U.S. 640 (1983), it would be fine to inventory a bag when you're being booked. But they hadn't gotten that far, and I'm not aware of any evidence that they would have actually booked him without the contents of the bag.
Also, AFAIK, they're allowed to do a basic search to ensure that someone doesn't have a weapon on them or nearby. It wouldn't make sense to require a warrant for that. Imagine a cop had to apply for a search warrant to ensure that the person they were arresting didn't have a knife or gun in their pocket.
In that case, it might make sense to search his backpack if it was right next to him. OTOH, if they took his backpack away from him, then they were no longer in danger from anything in the backpack so they had no justification to search it.
You just know that the police are going to lie about these things. They'll claim he was never separated from his backpack so they were justified in searching it for something dangerous. Or they'll claim that they had reason to believe there was a bomb so even though he didn't have it on him, they still had a reason to search it because it still posed an immediate danger.
The only way anybody can get a fair trial is to have an expensive team of lawyers who can chase down all these various lies, finding out what was said on body cams, when the body cams were mysteriously turned off, what the exact timeline of everything was, etc.