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Alright, guys got another great question from a police officer in Texas. So here's the situation. So you stop a car, you gain voluntary consent to search the vehicle. And the driver says, Yes, you get the driver out. And then you conduct the pat-down on the driver, and you feel like hard objects in their pocket. And you ask the driver whether or not you could retrieve the item.

He says, Yes, you retrieve the item, you pull it out of his pocket, you open it up, and there's heroin inside the container. And the question is, is, is asking him whether you can retrieve the item also allow you to search the item? Well, it depends. Let's look at the legal role. The legal role, is that whether or not you could open an item and search it under consent depends on whether or not you opened it, it was within the scope of the search. Now, this is an objective test, typically, where where, what would a reasonably objective person believe you're allowed to do when you ask the person whether you could retrieve the item did that when you asked the person if you could retrieve the item? And they said, Yes, that also include you opening the item? And so if there's there's no clear-cut answer, because you never asked the person whether or not you could open that and you said, Can I retrieve the item? So what are some of the factors that are going to come into play here? One is, would a reasonable person believe that when a police officer says, After putting down an object in their pocket, the police officer asked, you know, can I retrieve that item? I think, and actually in addition, not only that, but you also just ask for consent to search the vehicle. So we know that the reason person would know that the officer is interested in searching for something, whether it's drugs, you know, proceeds from drug sales, weapons, and so forth, or stolen property. So we already know that a reasonable person is going to be on alert that the officer is interested in searching. And so when you ask a person to retrieve an object from their pocket, it's it's implied that they want to search it. Because otherwise, why would the police officer want to simply grab a, an object out of the person's pocket? And I mean, I guess they could, they could look at it. But that's probably not going to tell you much. The officers, most recent people believe that daughter actually wants to search it. That's why they're asking if they can retrieve it. So I believe just with these barebone facts that you that most courts are are probably going to find that it's implied that within the consent to search of scope is implied that the officer is actually looking to look inside the item, not just retrieve it. Which brings me to my next point, you may still be able to retrieve the item under a protective under the Terry forest doctrine. In other words, that item may be considered a weapon under the pat-down. But that doesn't necessarily allow you to get inside the item either. So the better approach here is to justify the search under the implied scope of when I asked to retrieve that included looking inside of it. So I think that this is most likely a good search. It's not black and white, of course, because there's gonna be a fight. In court, you know, if the defense attorney wants to argue that the opening it opening the item was outside the scope of the search, I think he loses because I think a reasonable person would believe that opening the item was within the scope of the search. But good question. I hope this discussion helped and just come to the factors that the courts are going to look at, so be safe, and until next time. I'm out

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