" `Search of the person becomes lawful when grounds for arrest and accusation have been discovered, and the law is in the act of subjecting the body of the accused to its physical dominion.'"

However, the immunity is not from all search and seizure, but from such search and seizure unreasonable in the light of common-law traditions

"[E] arly cases suggest that there is an unrestricted `right on the part of the government always recognized under English and American law, to search the person of the accused when legally arrested, to discover and seize the fruits or evidences of crime.'"

Moore correctly notes that several important state-court decisions have defined the lawfulness of arrest in terms of compliance with state law. See Brief for Respondent 32-33

Robinson was based in part on the notion that a lawful arrest empowers an officer to disarm, and if "he ma [y] disarm, he may search, lest a weapon be concealed."

—second, once a search of the arrested person for weapons is permitted, it would be both impractical and unnecessary to enforcement of the Fourth Amendment's purpose to attempt to confine the search to those objects alone.

Moreover, the court today points to no instance in which the Supreme Court has used the phrase "incident to" to mean anything other than a search that has followed a lawful custodial arrest; the formal arrest may follow the search, but for the warrant exception to apply, the police must have unambiguously taken prior action such that a reasonable person in the suspect's …

The rule now embodied in the statute was received into English law as the outcome of the prosecution of Wilkes and Entick

Once the body of the accused is validly subjected to the physical dominion of the law, inspections of his person, regardless of purpose, cannot be deemed unlawful

The exception may in part be a surviving incident of the historic role of'hue and cry'in early Anglo-Saxon law.

[CITATION] Virginia v. Moore