Texas-Book-Gun Law Armed And Educated - Flipbook - Page 63
the property of the person arrested as well as to protect the police
from any false allegations of stealing or losing the property. For the
search to provide admissible evidence, courts require that the police
department must have procedures in place for performing inventories
of automobiles. South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364 (1976). In
practice, virtually every police agency has a valid inventory search
policy. Many times, the police will use this opportunity to perform
a thorough search of the car, its trunk, and all of its contents. The
courts have determined that this “inventory” can be done without a
warrant and any contraband or other evidence of criminal activity
that is lawfully obtained constitutes admissible evidence. Note:
as an example of the continued evolution of Fourth Amendment
jurisprudence, the Fourteenth Court of Appeals in Texas issued an
opinion that vastly expands the government’s right to conduct an
inventory search. In State v. Jackson, 468 S.W.3d 189 (Tex. App.—
Houston [14th Dist.] 2015, no pet.), the Court ruled that an officer
could conduct an inventory search of a vehicle even though that
vehicle was eventually released to a third party instead of impounded.
E. Consent
In practice, this is the most common way police officers gain
access to your home or vehicle to conduct a search. Most people
are conditioned to respect the authority of a police officer, and so
many people have a hard time saying no when an officer demands
permission to search. An officer can ask permission to search for any
reason or no reason at all. There is no evidentiary standard required
to ask a person for consent to conduct a search. The officer must
simply obtain consent “voluntarily.”
What is “voluntariness”? Texas courts have decided that
“voluntariness” as it applies to consent to search means more than
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