WHEN IS AN INVENTORY SEARCH NOT AN INVENTORY SEARCH ?

When Is an Inventory Search Not an Inventory Search?
By: Timothy Smith, Esq. 

Police officers engage in searches and seizures on a daily basis. One search that is commonly conducted is an inventory search of items in the possession of an arrestee, such as a handbag or a purse. In a recent case, entitled State v. Hummel, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a warning that not all such searches will be accepted by the courts as valid just because the police claim that they were conducting a routine inventory search. The Hummel case concerns the legality of a search and seizure of the contents of the handbag of a woman named Lori Hummel while she was detained at the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office by two local police detectives. Ms. Hummel was a suspect in a stabbing death. In order to talk to her, she was picked up on two outstanding traffic bench warrants.

The detectives brought her to the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office and placed her in an interrogation room. She was seated at a table and she placed her purse on the table. She was questioned by the police and eventually invoked her right to counsel. Once she invoked her right to an attorney, her ankle was cuffed to a bar on the floor and she was told that she was in custody. A detective took her purse. This prompted her to remark that she hoped that the $500 in cash that she had in the purse would not go missing. In response, the detectives took everything out of her purse. They found documents that, later on, linked her to the murder victim. One detective then put all of the purse’s contents back in the purse and left the room with the purse.

After several hours, the police released Ms. Hummel from custody. She was arrested three days later for the murder. The Supreme Court suppressed the documents found in Ms. Hummel’s purse by the police. The court rejected the argument that the search was a legitimate inventory search justified by the officer’s safety concerns and by Ms. Hummel’s exclamation that she feared that the police would steal her money. As to the first claimed justification, the need to protect the police from any weapons that might be in the purse, the court pointed out that Ms. Hummel was allowed to keep her purse open and within her reach during the entire interrogation. Furthermore, she was even permitted to rummage through her purse several times in front of the detectives during the questioning. Also, the detectives never frisked Ms. Hummel. Last, the court considered it crucial that the police asked Ms. Hummel if she would rather examine the contents of her purse herself before the police searched it. Hence, the court concluded, it “was clear” that the police truly had no safety concerns with regard to the contents of Ms. Hummel’s purse. The Supreme Court also rejected the State’s argument that the police reasonably searched through the purse in response to Ms. Hummel’s explicit theft threat.

The court did so because the search that was conducted went beyond what would have been necessary to uncover Ms. Hummel’s cash. The problem was that when the police came across the incriminating documents, they read those documents. “Clearly,” the Supreme Court said, “an inspection of the details of [the documents] found inside” Ms. Hummel’s purse went beyond what was necessary to determine whether she actually had $500 in cash in her purse. In addition, the Supreme Court noted that inventory searches should be conducted according to standardized practices. Here, at the motion to suppress, the State offered no proof that the local police department involved actually had any policy or procedure in place as to how to conduct inventory searches. Last, the court ruled that the police detectives had recourse to less intrusive alternatives to protect them against false theft claims that would have simultaneously respected Ms. Hummel’s constitutionally protected privacy rights. According to the court, “They could have, for example, placed [Ms. Hummel’s] purse directly into a sealed evidence bag or asked [her] to make arrangements for someone to retrieve the bag from the prosecutor's office.” In sum, a claim that a search was conducted as an inventory search will not fly where the surrounding circumstances show that the police were actually engaged in a search for evidence— rather than a “traditional” inventory search conducted for administrative reasons according to standard practices of the department. In short, calling a search an inventory search doesn’t necessarily make it so.