Court: Cops in violent area who've just pulled over a car of people acting suspiciously have right to open glove box

The Massachusetts Appeals Court said today prosecutors can used a gun found in the glove compartment of a car pulled over by Boston Police officers against the men charged with illegal possession of the gun.

A lower-court judge had agreed to toss the gun as evidence against William A. Graham and Robert Kines, saying the four officers didn't have probably cause to open the locked glove box when they pulled over a car for traffic violations on Perrin Street in Roxbury on July 22, 2008.

But a majority of a three-judge appellate panel ruled other factors gave the officers the right to search the glove box immediately and without a warrant to protect their own safety: The officers were patrolling Fayston Street, which had seen a spate of violent incidents. When the car pulled onto the street, they saw "a group of people on a sidewalk shrink back and away as the defendants' vehicle slowed while passing them." When they stopped the car, they realized all four occupants had gang links and that one had a history of gun-related offenses:

In addition, one of the officers had seen Kines, the driver, lock the glove compartment after retrieving the registration and heard him express concern about leaving his keys behind after he got out of the vehicle. The exit order had been prompted by Kines's refusal to stop reaching down between the seat and the center console after one of the officers told him to keep his hands in sight.

And then, during a pat frisk, the officers found knives on both Kines and Graham, the court recounted.

Taken together, those circumstances were sufficient to give the officers a reasonable concern for their own safety.

Judge Malcolm Graham, however, dissented, saying the men never posed enough of a threat to the police to allow a warrantless search of the car - or even their pockets, in which the knives were found:

Here, there were neither furtive movements by the occupants of the car nor were there erratic movements or behavior by them. The driver produced a license and registration for the vehicle, the occupants cooperated in leaving the vehicle, and a patfrisk of the occupants and a search of the interior of the vehicle failed to uncover any weapons or threats to four armed police officers. Given these facts as found by the judge, and fully supported in the record, the judge was correct in concluding that the search of the locked glove compartment exceeded the proper bounds of a protective search.

Complete ruling.