Why Police Officers Love the “Plain View” Exception

Police officers love the “plain view” exception to the Fourth Amendment requirement for a warrant.

It is because this exception is so straightforward and understandable:  I didn’t need a warrant because I saw it with my own eyes.  I immediately recognized it as contraband.  So I grabbed it.

All the other exceptions are much more complicated, and the law surrounding them is always changing.  How can you be sure an arrest is “lawful” with respect to the search-incident-to-arrest exception? What is “reasonable suspicion” for a stop-and-frisk?  How do you define “hot pursuit”?  That type of thing.

Not so with the old “plain view” standby.  Police officers don’t need a law degree to figure it out.

As a result, officers will often opt for this exception even if they could have stuck to the truth and still prevailed under another exception. But it is a slippery slope. Once they have bent the truth to justify the legality of the stop through the “plain view” exception, it becomes easier to tell an even bigger lie the next time.

And they can often get themselves into all sorts of trouble with the lie.  They develop xray vision and see things that no mortal could possibly see. They tell contorted stories that no reasonable person would ever believe.  And judges who accept these tall stories for the sake of convenience – the search must have been legally justified through one of the exceptions so why not this one? — aren’t doing anybody a favor.  Neither is the prosecutor who decides to look the other way.

I had a case the other day in which the officer went to great lengths to explain how he could have seen contraband sticking out of a client’s pocket when the physical evidence – and the officer’s own previous testimony — screamed foul.  What the officer did not seem to realize is that he could have justified recovery of the contraband through the “search-incident-to-arrest” exception.

Falsus in unius, falsus in omnibus.  Or, as my grandmother always liked to say, “too clever by half.”  Except when the judge accepts the lie. In that case, it is simply “clever.”