The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a new ruling last week that requires law enforcement to have a warrant for conducting a vehicle search.

This new ruling overturns the 2014 case of Commonwealth v. Gary in which police were allowed to conduct warrantless searches. In 2014, police were given the authority to conduct warrantless searches so long as there was probable cause. Probable cause could include a driver concealing contraband or evidence that a crime had occurred inside the vehicle. Under the 2014 ruling, drivers were also at risk for getting arrested even if they did not have anything illegal in their car but had what was deemed as “secret compartments” as was the case in Commonwealth v. Gary.

In that ruling, Justice Seamus McCaffery wrote for the court. He shared that probable cause was all that was needed by police to search a vehicle because it was "a strong and sufficient safeguard against illegal searches."

Critics of the 4-2 ruling, however, argued that warrantless searches would promote bad policing. In 2019, the Philadelphia Inquirer analyzed police searches in which they found that Philadelphia police were conducting on average 2,000 searches a month based on their previous policy that read in part, “A police officer who has lawfully stopped a vehicle and has probable cause to believe that evidence/contraband is concealed somewhere within the vehicle, may conduct a probing search of the vehicle without a warrant.” The analysis found that of those searches, 80% were conducted on black drivers with search results yielding drugs and other contraband only 12% of the time; notably, Blacks make up only 43.6% of the Philadelphia population according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

New Ruling Reverses 2014 Decision

The reversal comes after the court’s majority ruled in a 4-3 decision that Philadelphia's Constitution enshrines greater privacy protections than that of the U.S. Constitution. The court ruled that these privacy protections extend to vehicles as well, just as they would a personal residence.

Justice Christine Donohue wrote for the majority stating, “The long history of Article I, Section 8 and its heightened privacy protections do not permit us to carry forward a bright-line rule that gives short shrift to citizens’ privacy rights.”

In dissent, Justice Sally Mundy argued the court’s previous decision should stand due to its precedential value. Justice Mundy expressed, “When we become untethered from our previous decisions, we instantly implicate this court’s credibility and our ability to effectively adjudicate the many types of cases upon which litigants look to us for guidance.” Mundy explains that the previous standard of needing only probable cause to search a vehicle “offered a bright-line rule already in effect” and “deferred to the needs of those we entrust with the difficult job of policing.”

The new ruling sets the default rule for vehicle searches to be conducted with a search warrant. However, warrantless searches can still be conducted by police if there is probable cause and there are exigent circumstances at play. If a warrantless search is conducted, then a court will need to review whether or not the exigent circumstances indeed existed for the search to take place.

Justice Donohue also wrote in reference to the state’s institutional language regarding searches, “Difficulties in clarifying the scope of the exigency requirement will lead to debates about what exactly the Pennsylvania Constitution demands in a given situation. But so what?”

Justice Donohue’s reference to exigent circumstances highlights the point that exigent circumstances are difficult to define because of the wide scope they cover. Exigent circumstances cover a variety of beliefs, including whether or not someone is an imminent danger or that criminal evidence will soon disappear if not recovered through a warrantless search.

This new ruling will require the Philadelphia police to change their current policy procedures policy, and it is not yet clear how soon that will be done.