Virginia v. Moore
The Supreme Court ruled that police did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they arrested a man for a minor driving offense and searched him, even though Virginia law said they should have issued him a ticket instead of arresting him.
The decision means the Fourth Amendment's basic rule -- that police may arrest and search someone when they have probable cause to believe a crime occurred -- does not shrink or expand depending on what a particular state's own arrest laws say.
“When officers have probable cause to believe that a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest, and to search the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety.”
The Court's bottom-line rule that probable cause, not state arrest procedure, controls the Fourth Amendment analysis.
How it got here: A trial court refused to suppress the evidence and convicted Moore; after appeals back and forth, the Virginia Supreme Court reversed, and Virginia sought Supreme Court review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Portsmouth, Virginia police stopped David Lee Moore for driving on a suspended license. Under Virginia law, that offense normally required only a summons, not an arrest, but the officers arrested him anyway. A search that followed turned up crack cocaine and cash, leading to drug charges. Moore argued the arrest and search should be thrown out because Virginia law barred the arrest in the first place.
The question before the Court
If state law said police should only give a driver a ticket, not arrest him, does arresting him anyway and searching him violate the Fourth Amendment?
The Court's answer
No -- the Fourth Amendment does not require throwing out evidence just because police broke a state law limiting when they can arrest someone. The Court ruled that as long as officers had probable cause to believe a crime occurred, the arrest itself was constitutionally reasonable, no matter what Virginia's own statute said about issuing a summons instead.
Because the arrest was constitutionally valid, the search that followed it was also valid; officers may search someone they've lawfully arrested to protect themselves and preserve evidence. Virginia remains free to punish officers who ignore its summons-only rule through other means, like discipline or a lawsuit, but the Constitution itself does not demand suppressing the evidence in a criminal case.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Evidence found during an arrest that technically violated state procedure can still be used at trial, because the Constitution does not automatically borrow state arrest rules. States remain free to give their own residents more protection than the Fourth Amendment requires, but if police break those extra state-law rules, the fix is a state remedy (discipline, a lawsuit) rather than tossing out evidence in a criminal case.
What changes now
The Virginia Supreme Court's ruling suppressing the drug evidence is reversed, and the case goes back for further proceedings consistent with this decision, meaning the evidence can now be used against Moore. This is a final merits ruling that settles the broader constitutional question for all similar cases: violating a state's own arrest procedures does not, by itself, create a Fourth Amendment violation.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide that state arrest laws are meaningless -- states can still discipline officers or let arrested people sue for violations of state law. It decided only that such violations do not automatically trigger the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule in federal constitutional terms.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Ginsburg
Justice Ginsburg agreed with the outcome but not all of the reasoning. She thought the historical record actually supported Moore's view more than the majority credited, and she believed the Di Re decision was rooted in the Fourth Amendment itself rather than the Court's supervisory power. She agreed, however, that Virginia could have made this offense arrestable and chose not to, and that the state's decision to limit remedies for its own summons rule did not turn the arrest into a constitutional violation.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first looked to history -- the statutes and common law understood by the people who ratified the Fourth Amendment -- to see whether the Amendment was originally meant to make violations of state arrest statutes into constitutional violations. Finding no clear historical answer either way, the Court moved to its usual balancing approach.
- Under that approach, the Court weighs how much a search or arrest intrudes on someone's privacy against how much the government needs it to serve legitimate law-enforcement interests. Applying that balance, the Court's long-standing rule is that an arrest based on probable cause -- a reasonable basis to believe a crime occurred -- is constitutionally reasonable, even for minor crimes.
- The Court explained that when a state chooses to give its residents more protection against arrest than the Constitution requires, that choice does not change what the Fourth Amendment itself demands; states can set stricter rules for themselves without turning every violation of those extra rules into a federal constitutional violation.
- The Court distinguished an older case, United States v. Di Re, explaining that its suppression rule rested on the Court's supervisory power over federal courts, not on the Constitution, so it did not require excluding evidence here.
- The Court reasoned that tying Fourth Amendment protection to each state's own arrest statutes would make constitutional rights vary unpredictably from state to state and would undercut the need for simple, easy-to-apply rules for police in the field.
- Turning to the search itself, the Court held that because the arrest was constitutionally valid, officers were entitled to search Moore incident to that arrest to protect their safety and preserve evidence, regardless of what Virginia's citation rule said.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes United States v. Di Re (332 U.S. 581)
The Court said Di Re's evidence-suppression rule came from its supervisory power over federal courts, not the Constitution, so it did not apply here.
Reaffirms Atwater v. Lago Vista (532 U.S. 318)
The Court relied on Atwater's rule that probable cause makes even minor-crime arrests constitutionally reasonable.
Distinguishes Knowles v. Iowa (525 U.S. 113)
The Court said Knowles, which limited searches after citations, did not control because Moore was actually arrested.