In Thornton v. U.S., 541 U.S. 615 (2004), the Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine whether Belton's rule is limited to situations where the officer makes contact with the occupant while the occupant is inside the vehicle or whether it applies as well when the officer first makes contact with the arrestee after the latter has stepped out of his vehicle. In deciding the question, the Court concluded that Belton governs even when an officer does not make contact until the person arrested has left the vehicle. Petitioner Marcus Thornton was first noticed by Officer Deion Nichols of the Norfolk, Virginia, Police Department, who was in uniform but driving an unmarked police car, when he slowed down so as to avoid driving next to the officer. After discovering from a computer check of petitioner's license tags, which revealed that the tags had been issued to a 1982 Chevy two-door and not to a Lincoln Towne Car, the model of car petitioner was driving, Thornton drove into a parking lot, parked, and got out of the vehicle before the officer had an opportunity to pull him over. The officer pulled in behind him, parked the patrol car and accosted Thornton, asking him for his driver's license. He also told him that his license tags did not match the vehicle that he was driving. Upon questioning by the officer, Thornton admitted that he had drugs on him and reached into his pocket and pulled out two individual bags, one containing three bags of marihuana and the other containing a large amount of crack cocaine. Also recovered from under the driver's seat was a BryCo 9-millimeter handgun. Id. at 617-18, 124 S. Ct. at 2129. The Court ultimately held: In all relevant aspects, the arrest of a suspect who is next to a vehicle presents identical concerns regarding officer safety and the destruction of evidence as the arrest of one who is inside the vehicle. An officer may search a suspect's vehicle under Belton only if the suspect is arrested. See Knowles v. Iowa, 525 U.S. 113. A custodial arrest is fluid and "the danger to the police officer flows from the fact of the arrest, and its attendant proximity, stress, and uncertainty," U.S. v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 218, 234-235 and n.5 (1973) and n.5, 38 L. Ed. 2d 427, 94 S. Ct. 467 . See Washington v. Chrisman, 455 U.S. 1 (1982) ("Every arrest must be presumed to present a risk of danger to the arresting officer"). The stress is no less merely because the arrestee exited his car before the officer initiated contact, nor is an arrestee less likely to attempt to lunge for a weapon or to destroy evidence if he is outside of, but still in control of, the vehicle. In either case, the officer faces a highly volatile situation. It would make little sense to apply two different rules to what is, at bottom, the same situation. In some circumstances it may be safer and more effective for officers to conceal their presence from a suspect until he has left his vehicle. Certainly that is a judgment officers should be free to make. But under the strictures of petitioner's proposed "contact initiation" rule, officers who do so would be unable to search the car's passenger compartment in the event of a custodial arrest, potentially compromising their safety and placing incriminating evidence at risk of concealment or destruction. The Fourth Amendment does not require such a gamble. Petitioner argues, however, that Belton will fail to provide a "bright-line" rule if it applies to more than vehicle "occupants." Brief for Petitioner 29-34. But Belton allows police to search the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to a lawful custodial arrest of both "occupants" and "recent occupants." 453 U.S. at 460, 101 S. Ct. 2860. Indeed, the respondent in Belton was not inside the car at the time of the arrest and search; he was standing on the highway. In any event, while an arrestee's status as a "recent occupant" may turn on his temporal or spatial relationship to the car at the time of the arrest and search, it certainly does not turn on whether he was inside or outside the car at the moment that the officer first initiated contact with him. (Id. at 621-22.)