Gregory T. Moro, Esq.
Moro & Moro, Attorneys at Law
It is a little after eleven on a weeknight. You are on Route 11 heading home, and you get stopped for a taillight, or for drifting once over the fog line, or for following too closely. The trooper takes your license and registration back to the cruiser. He comes back and, before he hands anything over, he asks you to step out. Then he says something that sounds almost casual:
"You don't have anything in the car I should know about, do you? Mind if I take a look?"
Whatever happens in the next ninety seconds will probably decide your case. Not the trial. Not the plea negotiation. Those ninety seconds.
Most serious drug and firearms cases in this part of Pennsylvania begin exactly this way. Somebody gets stopped on Route 11, Route 54, Route 42, or the interstate, and a routine traffic stop turns into a search. And in nearly every one of those cases, the question that matters most is not whether the person possessed what the police found. It is whether the police were allowed to look.
That question gets answered at a suppression hearing. This article explains what actually happens there, and what the Commonwealth has to prove.
Pennsylvania Is Not the Same as Federal Law
Under federal law, a police officer with probable cause to believe a car contains evidence of a crime can search it on the spot. No warrant. That is the federal automobile exception, and it has been the rule for a hundred years.
Pennsylvania briefly adopted that rule. Then it took it back.
In Commonwealth v. Alexander, decided in December 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that Article I, Section 8 of our state constitution protects privacy more broadly than the Fourth Amendment does. The Court overruled its earlier decision in Commonwealth v. Gary and returned Pennsylvania to what it called the limited automobile exception. The holding is short and it matters enormously:
A warrantless search of a vehicle for evidence of a crime requires both probable cause and exigent circumstances. One without the other is not enough.
Read that again, because it is routinely misunderstood, sometimes by the people conducting the search. Probable cause alone does not authorize an officer to open your trunk in Pennsylvania. The default rule here is the same as it is for your house: get a warrant. A warrantless search is presumed to be unreasonable, and the burden is on the Commonwealth to justify it.
What Counts as an Emergency
So what is an exigent circumstance?
The Alexander Court deliberately refused to draw a bright line. It declined to list the situations that qualify, and said instead that courts would have to decide case by case, on the specific facts, whether obtaining a warrant was reasonably practicable. The Court was explicit that it was not concerned with whether this made police work harder.
What the Court did make clear is that the mere fact that a car has wheels is not an emergency. If mobility by itself satisfied the exigency requirement, then every vehicle search would qualify and the rule would mean nothing.
That is where these hearings are won and lost. By the time an officer decides to search, the typical scene looks like this. The driver is out of the car. Sometimes he is in the back of a patrol unit. A second unit has arrived. The keys are in the trooper's pocket. Nobody is driving that vehicle anywhere. And Pennsylvania's rules of criminal procedure allow a warrant application to be submitted by advanced communication technology, meaning an officer on the shoulder of Route 11 can often reach an on-call magisterial district judge without leaving the scene.
When all of that is true, the Commonwealth still has to explain what made it impracticable to get a warrant. Sometimes there is a real answer: a passenger who was never detained and has access to the car, a genuine safety concern, a scene that cannot be secured, weather, a road that cannot be blocked. Sometimes there is no answer at all, and nobody asks the question unless defense counsel asks it.
The Smell of Marijuana
For decades, an officer who smelled marijuana had an automatic search. That rule is gone.
In Commonwealth v. Barr, decided in 2021, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that after the Medical Marijuana Act, the odor of marijuana alone cannot establish probable cause to search a vehicle. Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians can lawfully possess cannabis, medical cannabis smells the same as any other, and an odor that is equally consistent with lawful conduct cannot by itself support a search. The odor is still a factor. It is no longer the whole analysis.
Police adapted. The current pattern, which shows up repeatedly in the recent case law, is that an officer who smells marijuana starts building the rest of the file: questions about a medical card, observations about nervousness or movement inside the car, a canine, and then an application for a search warrant.
In Commonwealth v. Gould, decided by the Superior Court in 2026, a trooper stopped a driver on Route 283 in Dauphin County for a keep-right violation, smelled marijuana, and asked whether the driver had a medical marijuana card. The driver said he did not. The trooper obtained a search warrant. The Superior Court upheld both the extension of the stop and the warrant, holding that the odor combined with the driver's own admission gave the magistrate a substantial basis for finding probable cause even after Barr.
The lesson cuts in two directions. For the Commonwealth, the safe path after Alexander is to stop talking about exigency and go get a warrant. For the defense, that means the fight moves. Instead of attacking the search, you attack the affidavit that supported the warrant and the investigative detention that produced the information in it. And it means that what the driver said at the roadside is very often the evidence that made the warrant work.
Consent, the Quiet Issue
Here is the part that surprises people. A large share of roadside searches in Pennsylvania are not justified by probable cause, exigency, or a warrant. They are justified by consent, because the driver said yes.
Consent is a real exception. Alexander did not disturb it. But consent has to be voluntary, and voluntariness is judged on the totality of the circumstances, including whether the traffic stop had actually ended when the request was made. A trooper who still has your license and registration, who has not told you that you are free to go, and who then asks for permission to search, has created a situation a court can find was still a seizure. Whether the request came after the business of the stop was finished, whether the driver was told he could refuse, how many officers were present, and the tone and duration of the encounter all matter.
Two practical points follow, and they are worth saying plainly. You are allowed to say no. Refusing a search is not a crime, it is not evidence of guilt, and by itself it does not give police probable cause. Saying yes forfeits nearly everything. If you consent, there is usually no exigency question, no probable cause question, and very little left to litigate.
Inventory Searches and the Tow Truck
There is one more route into a car, and it does not require probable cause at all.
When police lawfully impound a vehicle, they may inventory its contents. The theory is that this is not an investigation. It is caretaking, done to protect the owner's property and to protect the department from claims about missing items. Because it is not investigative, it requires no probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
After Alexander, defendants argued that inventory searches of cars could not survive, since Pennsylvania now treats the interior of a vehicle as genuinely private. In Commonwealth v. Thompson, the Superior Court rejected that argument in 2023 and preserved the exception. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to decide the question, heard argument, and then in May 2024 dismissed the appeal without answering it. Justice Wecht wrote separately to object that the Court had refused to decide the very issue it agreed to review, and argued that inventory searches rest on a fiction and should be held unreasonable under Article I, Section 8.
So the exception stands, and the larger question is still open. For now, an inventory search is lawful in Pennsylvania only if two things are true: the impoundment itself was lawful, and the search followed a reasonable, standard departmental policy for securing and cataloging contents.
Both halves are contestable, and they are contested less often than they should be. Did the car have to be towed at all, or could it have been legally parked, locked, and left, or released to a licensed passenger or a family member who came to the scene? Is there a written policy, and did anyone produce it? Did the officer follow it, or did the inventory somehow focus on the places where contraband is kept and skip the places where valuables are kept? An inventory that looks like a search for evidence is a search for evidence, whatever it is called on the report.
What the Hearing Actually Looks Like
A suppression motion is filed as part of an omnibus pretrial motion, ordinarily within thirty days after arraignment. That deadline is short and it is real.
At the hearing, the Commonwealth carries the burden. It must establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the evidence was not obtained in violation of the defendant's rights. This is one of the few proceedings in a criminal case where the prosecution has to go first and prove something before trial.
The officer testifies. Then he is cross-examined, under oath, about a sequence of events he may have summarized in three sentences in an affidavit:
When did the stop begin, and when was its purpose complete?
When were the license and registration returned, if they were?
What was the basis for the search?
What made a warrant impracticable?
Who else was on scene?
Where was the defendant standing?
What does the dash camera show, and what does the body camera show, and do they match the report?
That last question is why these motions matter. Video exists in most of these cases now, and it does not always agree with the narrative written afterward. The preliminary hearing transcript matters for the same reason, which is one of several reasons we do not waive preliminary hearings casually.
If the motion is granted, the evidence is out. In a possession case where the evidence is the contraband, the prosecution usually ends there.
If This Has Already Happened to You
A few things that consistently make a difference:
Write down what happened while you remember it. The time, the reason given for the stop, the exact words used when the search was requested, how many officers were there, whether you were told you could leave, whether you were handcuffed, whether your car was towed and why.
Do not talk about the case with anyone but your lawyer. Not on a recorded jail line, not on social media, not to the officer who seems sympathetic.
Preserve the video. Dash and body camera footage is subject to retention schedules that are measured in weeks at some departments. A preservation request needs to go out early.
Do not assume the case is over because they found something. Whether the police were allowed to look is a separate question from what they found, and it is the question the law asks first.
The Bottom Line
Pennsylvania decided, deliberately, that your car is not a place the government can search simply because it has a hunch and a good reason. The state constitution requires a warrant unless the Commonwealth can prove both probable cause and a genuine reason it could not wait.
That protection only operates if somebody invokes it. Nobody at the scene is going to tell you that the search was questionable. The suppression hearing is where that gets decided, and getting there requires a motion filed on time, a record built early, and a lawyer who treats the traffic stop as the center of the case rather than the preamble to it.
If your case started with a stop on a highway in Montour, Columbia, Northumberland, or surrounding Counties, that stop is where we start.
Gregory T. Moro has defended criminal cases in Pennsylvania for nearly forty years. Moro & Moro, Attorneys at Law, is located at 121 E. Market Street, Danville, Pennsylvania, and represents clients in Montour, Columbia, Northumberland, and surrounding counties.
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