Kahler v. Pennsylvania

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that officer with probable cause to arrest could conduct search of defendant’s person incident to arrest, regardless of whether the officer had any intent of arresting him or was merely intending to issue a citation
• holding that an objectively reasonable mistake of law supported probable cause
• concluding officer made reasonable mistake of law in arresting defendant because New York open container statute was ambiguous, appellate court had not considered the meaning of the statute, and trial courts had issued conflicting decisions
• “The authority to conduct a full field search as incident to arrest [is] a bright-line rule.”
• “[A] search incident to an arrest may take place before the arrest itself ‘as long as probable cause to arrest existed at the time of the search.’”
• officer’s “assessment was premised on a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous state law, the scope of which had not yet been clarified” and other New York courts had reached conflicting conclusions

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).