But if you agree to a search you lose any chance of your lawyer getting anything found in it excluded from evidence against you. Keep in mind, in at least one state it is a felony to have a hidden compartment in your car. Sure, you will have a chance to spend your life savings proving your innocence and that it was done by the previous owner, but its easier to just have your lawyer quash it early.
“Keep in mind, in at least one state it is a felony to have a hidden compartment in your car.”
What if the ‘hidden compartment’ is OEM? We have a few different vehicles and I keep finding new compartments and pouches and etc. all over them!
If I were Great Lord High Poo-Bah Of Everything, I would pass a law stating specifying that police "requests" shall be presumed to be coercive unless the police can demonstrate that a decision to "voluntarily" comply could not plausibly have been a result of real or perceived coercion. For example, a motorist who has been stopped for a moving violation but has not been issued a ticket may reasonably believe that the decision of whether or not to issue the ticket may be influenced by the motorist's willingness to waive Constitutional liberties; consequently, any "voluntary" waiver of Fourth Amendment rights should be regarded as coerced. Further, if a cop misrepresents his ability to get a warrant, any "voluntary" waiver of Fourth Amendment rights in the supposed interest of saving time should be deemed to have been received fraudulently.
If juries who were examining evidence were also charged with judging the credibility and good faith of the people who produce it, and were instructed that evidence which is not gathered in good faith should not be construed in a fashion detrimental to defendant, I think that would offer cops a pretty strong incentive to avoid behaving in ways which might not be so patently illegal as to merit judicial rebuke, but are nonetheless sufficiently distasteful that jurors might balk at them. Judges are loath to strike evidence unless a search was patently unreasonable and could not have been done in good faith, but jurors might be more willing to consider not "Do I believe it might plausibly have been done in good faith", but "Do I believe it was done in good faith". Note that departments which have a history of harassing the public may find it hard to find jurors who trust them.