Arrest, Search, Seizure, Warrant Was search of purse legal?

[anygirl]

My daughter who is 20 dropped her purse getting into a car. Someone found the purse and turned it into the local police. The police contacted my daughter to say that they had found her purse and that she could pick it up at the station. When she went to the station she was read her rights and was told she was being charged with possessing a fake drivers license.
She does possess a legal drivers license. The fake license (another state) has her real name and listed her age as over 21. This fake license was secretly tucked away in the wallet, while the real license was in plain view as were other pieces of identifying information.

My question: Did they have the right to completely search her purse? In my opinion it was not necessary but hey, I'm a mom.

She has never been in trouble, is a fulltime student and this will really hurt her if convicted. In NJ, it's a 4th degree w/ fines and a 6th month loss of license.

Thank you in advance!

 

[NYClex]

Hm, this is an interesting borderline case. The issue here is twoflod: did your daughter have a justified interest in privacy, or in other words, did she give up that expectation of privacy, and secondly, was the police officer's search reasonable and justified.

It depends very much on the exact circumstances as you can read here in this very good example verdict written by the North Dakota Supreme Court: http://www.ndcourts.com/court/opinions/20020154.htm

As you can see in the example cases this verdict lists, the police is justified in trying to obtain information about the owner in obviously lost items which are lost in public places or under circumstances where they cannot easily obtain this information by other means. So assuming your daughter's purse was lost under those circumstances the issue then would be if it was reasonable for the police officer to conduct a further search after he already found the "real" driving license.

I would expect the Nort h Dakota court to say no, but I cannot tell you how cases like this were decided in New Jersey, if there are any, because I have not the time to research that. But as you can see, the issue might be worth raising. Your daughter should discuss this with her attorney.

 

[refusetostop]

I think you will have a hard time with this one. A lost or abandoned item no matter the size in police custody can be fully searched for two reasons. 1) In order to find the rightful owner. In this state even if an officer found the real license first it does not contain phone information to contact the owner and running the license would not give that information either. The officer could continue to search the purse or other item to find numbers to contact the owner. So you can see that if an officer was looking for a piece of paper with numbers on it he would have to go through the entire purse. 2) For officer safety he could look for any weapons inside the item. Not much room in a purse but if your vehicle was left somewhere he could search anywhere in that vehicle if it was abandoned or recovered from theft. Hope that helps.
I think I would also try to find out why my daughter had this in the first place. Getting the fake ID from her in this situation is a lot better than after she gets a DUI at 20 years of age. Also have you talked to the police to see if they would drop the charges if your daughter gives them information on where she obtained the fake ID. This might do some good in helping the officers uphold the laws instead of trying put blame on them for doing what they get paid to do.