You're trying to be a street cop.

Hey guys, welcome to this episode of the Street Cop Trading podcast.

You host founder and CEO Street Cup Training.

My name is Dennis Benito.

And today's Case Law Short is sponsored by, yes, Lady Law Shield.

If you are going through some difficult times at your workplace.

This is the woman you got to reach out to Bridget Chuxillow is a friend of mine, and she's a friend of ours,

like the Bafia, and she used to be a cop. So she knows cops well, and she became an attorney to defend

your rights against wrongful termination and workplace harassment. Check it out. Lady LawShield.com. Today we're talking about Wyoming

v. Houghton, 1999, and it's a U.S. Supreme Court case that addressed the scope of warrantless searches

of automobiles under the Fourth Amendment. So here's a summary of what happened. The case arose

when police officers in Wyoming stopped a car for a traffic violation, and during the stop,

found drug paraphernalia. The probable cause to believe that the driver and passenger were involved in drug-related

activity.

They searched the car and found drugs in a purse belonging to the passenger, Houghton.

The question before the court was whether police could search an individual's belongings

in a vehicle based solely on probable cause that the car contains

contraband or evidence of a crime, even if the belongings belong to a passenger and not the driver.

So what's the key legal issue? The central legal issue was whether the police could search a

passenger's personal belongings, in this case the purse, during a valid automobile search based on

probable cause that the car contained the evidence of the crime.

And this is what the Supreme Court said.

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