United States v. Edwards’s Empirical Analysis
554 F.2d 1331 · 1977
Citation profile
14 federal appellate · 11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 28 later decisions — most recently April 2014 · most notably United States v. Edwards (1978), State v. Slockbower (1979)
14 federal appellate · 11 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 1708
Relies on Carroll v. United States · Brinegar v. United States · Chimel v. California · Spinelli v. United States · Chambers v. Maroney
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Perhaps the greatest intrusions upon protected privacy that would result from eliminating the limits on inventory searches involve the reading of papers carried in the car. Such prospects weighed heavily in Justice Powell’s insistence that limits be imposed. See South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364 , 380 n. 7, 96 S. Ct. 3092 , 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976) (Powell, J. concurring). He noted that there the police found “ ‘miscellaneous papers,’ a checkbook, an installment loan book, and a social security status card,” but he emphasized that there was no showing that the police examined the contents of such items. The police merely removed them for storage. Id. Here, in contrast, the police read the seized checks and read the identification cards found on the front seat. The inventory rationale provides no warrant for doing so. Thus, even if the inventory theory allowed looking beneath the carpeting — which it did not — the police would not have been entitled to read the checks absent probable cause and exigent circumstances. The police are of course free to recognize items that appear to be government checks. Finding items that even without being read could probably be identified as checks might well have given the police probable cause under the circumstances here. Finding cards on the front seat, however, would not have. The officers were not entitled to read the cards, and the contents of the cards therefore cannot buttress the government’s probable cause theory. . . . Our emphas”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The fourth amendment is not crushed by the four wheels of an automobile; automobiles do not work a forfeiture of privacy.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.