The Permissible Scope of Texas Automobile Inventory Searches in the Aftermath of Colorado v. Bertine: A Talisman is Created

The "automobile exception" to the warrant requirement, was recognized by the Supreme Court in Carroll v. United States. The automobile exception does not, however, dispense with the requirement of probable cause. Rather, it recognizes the inherent exigency of vehicle mobility and, more importantly the diminished expectation of privacy in a vehicle's contents as justification for proceeding without a warrant. Fifty years after Carroll, in South Dakota v. Opperman, the Court approved an automobile inventory search conducted pursuant to standard police procedures as an administrative search alternative requiring neither probable cause nor a warrant. The reasoning in Opperman was first adopted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Robertson v. State. In 1981, in Gill v. State, the Texas court addressed the permissible scope of inventory searches, holding that the police may not search the locked trunk of an automobile while conducting an inventory search. Despite the simplicity of the Gill rule, the court of criminal appeals, in the recent decisions of Kelley v. State, Stephen v. State, and Guillett v. State, condoned police intrusion into both locked trunks and a locked glove compartment pursuant to a vehicle inventory. While none of these 1984 cases expressly overruled Gill, taken as a whole they significantly expand the scope of inventory permitted by a fair reading of Gill. It is this expansion, and its relation to the doctrinal bases for inventory search, that will be explored in this article