Just today, nine of them declared evidence discovered during searches that state law says are illegal is admissible in court.  What’s that?  There’s only nine justices?  Ouch…:

The Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law.  The unanimous decision comes in a case from Portsmouth, Va., where city detectives seized crack cocaine from a motorist after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense.

David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for police to issue a court summons and let the driver go.  Instead, city detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors say that drugs taken from him in a subsequent search can be used against him as evidence.

Cue Scalia promoting the Eric Cartman view of law enforcement in 3…2…1.

“We reaffirm against a novel challenge what we have signaled for half a century,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

Scalia said that when officers have probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest and to search the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety.

Virginia law said that for what they pulled this person over for, they were supposed to issue a summons, nothing more.  A failure on the part of the state of Virginia to assume that anyone driving on a suspended license is a suspect of other crimes, to Scalia, smacks of endorsement of the streets running red from random murder & children smoking crack in the open.  Isn’t that what he reads into everything?