Unpacking the Convoluted History of the Automobile Exception

For over seven decades, the United States Supreme Court has limited the scope of the Fourth Amendment’s automobile exception to permit only warrantless searches of vehicles and their containers. Against that precedent, the American Law Institute adopted Section 260.3 of the Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure in 1975. Section 260.3 permitted police officers to not only conduct warrantless searches of vehicles, but also vehicle occupants when the search of the vehicle failed to turn up evidence of a crime. As of 2019, only one state in the country maintains Section 260.3 as a rule or statute of criminal procedure. That state is Arkansas. Arkansas adopted Arkansas Rule of Criminal Procedure 14.1, governing warrantless vehicle searches, in 1976. Like Section 260.3, Rule 14.1 permits the warrantless search of a vehicle occupant—in addition to the vehicle itself. This Article demonstrates that Rule 14.1 deviates from the Supreme Court’s narrow construction and interpretation of the automobile exception. It does so by providing a chronological history of the automobile exception and summarizing the modern Supreme Court’s application of the same. At its core, the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence reflects that the automobile exception does not justify the warrantless search of a vehicle occupant. Because Rule 14.1—Arkansas’s expansive approach to warrantless vehicle searches—deviates from that approach, it is unconstitutional and must be significantly amended.