California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Dibb, 37 Cal.App.4th 832, 43 Cal.Rptr.2d 823 (Cal. App. 1995):
Whether an officer's suspicion that an object contained within a person's clothing consists of narcotics, derived at least in part from a [37 Cal.App.4th 836] patdown of a person's outer clothing, permits the officer to conduct a full-blown search of the individual or to seize the object felt depends on whether the officer had probable cause to arrest the person for narcotics possession; the warrantless search then becomes justified as a search incident to arrest. (People v. Lee (1987) 194 Cal.App.3d 975, 984, 240 Cal.Rptr. 32.)
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