Search & seizure; “Automobile exception” to the warrant requirement; “Probable cause”; Whether there was a “fair probability” that the vehicle contained evidence of a crime

[This appeal was from the WD-MI.] The court held that the police had “probable cause” to conduct a warrantless automobile search of defendant-Woods’s vehicle for a gun where there was a “fair probability” that the vehicle held evidence of a crime. An officer was dispatched on a report of domestic assault. The victim told the officers that, in addition to hitting her, Woods had held a “small” gun to her chest. Based on this information, the officer radioed “other officers in the area that there was probable cause Woods had committed a domestic assault. She added that Woods might be headed to his orange Dodge and that he had a gun.” Police eventually apprehended Woods in the apartment parking lot. He denied having a gun, but the police searched his vehicle and recovered a pistol. Woods was charged with FIP. He moved to suppress the firearm evidence, arguing that the warrantless search of his car violated the Fourth Amendment. The district court denied his motion. On appeal, the court held that “there was a fair probability that the gun was in Woods’s car, so the officers had probable cause to search it.” It concluded that they “reasonably believed the gun was evidence of a crime.” Two witnesses had seen Woods hit the victim and threaten her with a gun. “Those eyewitness accounts established probable cause that Woods had committed the crimes of assault and intentionally pointing a gun at another person. The gun was evidence of those crimes.” Because the officers did not find the gun after “reasonable efforts”—a canine search and a pat down—that “left the one place the police knew Woods had just been: his car.” This, along with a description of his vehicle, “created at least a fair probability that officers would find the gun in that car.” The court rejected the cases that Woods offered to support his arguments where, in those cases, “[o]fficers didn’t arrest those suspects at or near their cars.” Affirmed.