State v. Marquez and State v. Huerta

Police arrested Von Marquez at his apartment complex and seized a zipped backpack that they believed he left behind in a neighbor’s unit. They conducted what they claimed to be a valid inventory search and discovered pills that formed the basis for Mr. Marquez’s later conviction on drug charges.  

Police stopped and arrested Andrew Huerta while he was exiting a Whataburger drive-through. They conducted a search of his car and found a closed canister. They tore it apart to access a secret compartment at the bottom, in which they found pills that formed the basis for Mr. Huerta’s drug charges.

In both cases, police invoked the established inventory search exception to the warrant requirement. And in both cases, the Court of Appeals balanced the defendants’ privacy interests against the state’s asserted need and held the searches unconstitutional under Article II, Section 10 of the New Mexico Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches. The state appealed in both cases, and the New Mexico Supreme Court granted review.

Along with the ACLU of New Mexico, the ACLU’s SSCI filed an amicus brief urging the Court to adopt an independent approach to interpreting the New Mexico Constitution and to apply the Court of Appeals’ balancing test for the reasonableness of inventory searches under Article II, Section 10. Our brief advances two central arguments.

In Part I, we urge the Court to retire its current approach to state constitutional interpretation, known as the “interstitial approach.” That approach requires New Mexico courts to look first to federal law when interpreting state constitutional provisions that arguably have federal analogues and to justify any departures from federal jurisprudence. We argue that the interstitial approach no longer serves the values it was meant to advance, including cogency, efficiency, and federalism. Accordingly, we urge the Court to replace interstitial analysis with an independent framework that better serves those values. Under an independent approach, New Mexico courts would interpret the New Mexico Constitution in light of state-centric factors—including (a) state constitutional text, structure, and history, (b) preexisting and developing state law, and (c) contemporary state experience and values. 

In Part II, we apply this independent approach to the inventory searches at issue. We argue that the Court should adopt the Court of Appeals’ balancing test for the reasonableness of an inventory search under Article II, Section 10, because it is consistent with the New Mexico Constitution itself, case law from the New Mexico Supreme Court and other states, and New Mexico values