In a case pitting the sanctity of a person’s home against the government’s need to preserve evidence, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police can stop an individual from entering his or her home if they believe drugs or other evidence of a crime are inside.
Ruling in a case from central Illinois, the court said police did not violate Charles McArthur’s constitutional rights when they refused to let him go inside his house trailer while they got a search warrant.
The court, in an 8-1 vote, said police in Sullivan acted reasonably when they briefly kept McArthur outside because they reasoned he likely would have destroyed the drugs. After his arrest on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, McArthur conceded he would have done so if he had the opportunity.
The court announced its decision just before it heard arguments in another criminal case involving the sanctity of the home and the government’s power to intrude.
That case involved an Oregon man who challenged his arrest because police used readings from a thermal imaging device to obtain a warrant to search his home. That search revealed he was growing marijuana in the residence.
In the Illinois case, the court balanced the privacy interests with law-enforcement concerns and determined that police acted reasonably when they kept McArthur outside his home for about two hours in 1997.
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The court’s opinion, by Justice Stephen Breyer, emphasized the police had strong evidence that drugs were inside and that officers made reasonable efforts to respect McArthur’s privacy by seeking a warrant before searching his home. Moreover, the court noted that police kept McArthur outside for a “limited period of time.”
“Given the nature of the intrusion and the law-enforcement interest at stake, this brief seizure of the premises was permissible,” Breyer wrote.
An Illinois appellate court had said police illegally seized McArthur when they refused to let him go inside his home. McArthur had stepped outside the trailer to tell police they couldn’t come inside to look for marijuana when he found himself essentially evicted.
Justice David Souter wrote a separate concurring opinion in which he explained that the officers’ decision to impound McArthur’s home was actually less intrusive than action they could have taken. He noted that police could have allowed McArthur to go back inside and then, believing he was destroying evidence, followed him in for a warrantless search.
The Constitution’s 4th Amendment generally requires that police have warrants before conducting a search, but the court has created several exceptions, including when police believe a person is destroying evidence.
Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, arguing that the Illinois courts that sided with McArthur placed a higher value on the sanctity of a person’s home than on prosecuting “this petty offense.”
“They correctly viewed that interest–whether the home be a humble cottage, a second-hand trailer or a stately mansion–as one meriting the most serious constitutional protection,” Stevens wrote.
After announcing opinions Tuesday, the justices delved into a 1992 Oregon case pitting the government’s use of technology against a person’s right to privacy. The justices seemed divided on the issue as they struggled to decide when a technological device could become so intrusive that it runs afoul of the 4th Amendment.
At issue is whether police went too far when they used a thermal imaging device to measure heat being emitted from the Florence, Ore., home of Danny Lee Kyllo, who was suspected of growing marijuana. The imaging device revealed several hot spots on his home that suggested Kyllo could be using heat lamps to help plants grow.
That information was used to help police secure a warrant to search Kyllo’s home, where they discovered 100 marijuana plants growing under high-intensity heat lamps. Kyllo ultimately pleaded guilty but preserved his right to challenge the search as illegal because the police had used the imaging device.
A San Francisco-based federal appeals court panel initially agreed that the device was so intrusive it amounted to an illegal search of his home. But on rehearing, a reconfigured panel of judges sided with the government and allowed the use of the device, ruling that it didn’t amount to a search under the 4th Amendment.
The 4th Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Supreme Court has long held that a search occurs when the government intrudes into an area where a person would reasonably expect privacy.
If using the device constituted a search, the police should have gotten a warrant before they used it. A search without a warrant is generally considered unreasonable and in violation of the 4th Amendment.
The appeals court, however, didn’t think that using the device amounted to a search because it revealed no intimate activities inside the home. The court said the heat emissions were like the garbage a person leaves on the curb: Police are free to observe such waste products without getting a warrant.
But Kyllo’s lawyer, Kenneth Lerner, argued Tuesday that use of the imaging device was a search because people reasonably believe that activities inside their home will be kept private. He emphasized the “home is a basic refuge for all citizens,” where “we are free to let our guard down.”
Lerner compared imaging devices to wiretapping and other electronic devices. The Supreme Court has ruled that police must first get a warrant before using those devices.
Emphasizing that technological advances can only further infringe privacy, Lerner urged the court to adopt a broad rule that would limit or prevent police from using new devices without getting a warrant. He said police should not be able to capture private information from a home if they could not do so with their own unaided senses.
But a majority of the justices appeared to reject Lerner’s proposed rule, particularly because it would call into question the use of other aides that the court has approved, such as drug-sniffing dogs, flashlights and binoculars.
Michael Dreeben, a Justice Department lawyer, emphasized that the device does not penetrate the walls of the house or reveal particular objects or people behind the walls. Unlike the wiretapping devices, which reveal exact words of conversation, the imaging devices simply show heat emissions.
Moreover, he said the imaging device didn’t show anything that police would not learn after a snowfall, because the snow would melt more quickly from the warmer spots on the roof.
“There’s nothing wrong with the police using technology outside the house that will enable them to draw inferences inside the house,” Dreeben said.
Justice Antonin Scalia appeared to agree, noting that the thermal imaging devices didn’t reveal any particular activity inside the home.
But other justices appeared sympathetic to Kyllo. Souter, for example, said the devices could allow police to make inferences about “what’s going on in a very private place.”
Breyer also focused on the inside of the house, noting that people reasonably expect that “what they’re doing in the house will not be picked up by people outside the house.”
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Also on Tuesday, the court ruled that state athletic associations could be sued under federal civil rights law. The 5-4 decision revives a lawsuit by a private Tennessee high school against the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association. The association had argued that it could not be sued under the civil rights law because it was not a government actor.
The court also refused Tuesday to get involved in a dispute over whether the Endangered Species Act protects animals on private land. It let stand a federal appeals court decision that Congress was within its authority to regulate the killing of wild animals on private land.