The Supreme Court rules that warrants are required for driveway searches
FIVE years ago, Ryan Collins evaded police in Albermarle County, Virgnia by weaving through traffic at more than 140mph. But they caught up with him. Weeks later, after tracking down the extended-frame Suzuki Mr Collins had been driving, and finding it hidden under a tarp next to his girlfriend’s house, a police officer walked on the property, matched the licence plate to the rogue two-wheeler and got Mr Collins to admit he had bought the vehicle from someone who had stolen it. But when his case went to trial, Mr Collins claimed the officer’s investigation was a trespass and violated his Fourth Amendment rights; the evidence gathered during the search, he claimed, wasn’t admissible in court.
On May 29th, in Collins v Virginia, the Supreme Court sided with Mr Collins in an 8-1 vote by cabining the so-called “automobile exception” that has been in place for nearly a century. Police typically need a warrant to search someone’s property, but in 1925, the court adjusted the rules for automobiles. Cars, by their nature, are mobile, the justices held in Carroll v United States. It’s unreasonable to ask officers to get a judge’s say-so when they’re in hot pursuit of a getaway car or come across a vehicle that’s full of drugs or weapons. Another reason to give police more leeway to search cars: when traveling on the roads, people can’t expect the level of privacy they enjoy in their homes.
There may be good reason for an automobile exception, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the nearly unanimous court, but it should not apply to vehicles parked off the street and up the driveway of a private home. “[I]n order to reach the motorcycle”, Justice Sotomayor wrote, the officer “had to walk 30 feet or so up the driveway of the house”, invading “the home’s ‘curtilage””. A curtilage is the area within the outer boundary of a home’s environs: the patios, yard and driveway. It doesn’t “require fine-grained legal knowledge”, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2013, to discern that line or how one may conduct oneself within it. A stranger could knock on a front door, but “exploring the front path with a metal detector, or marching his bloodhound into the garden”, is another matter. The average Girl Scout or trick-or-treater, Justice Scalia wrote, typically manages the distinction “without incident”.
For Justice Sotomayor, Collins is an “easy case”. Permitting an officer to fall back on the automobile exception in an instance like this “would unmoor the exception from its justification” and “hollow” out the “core Fourth Amendment protection” people enjoy in and around their homes. If you park your car on your property, the court decided, you shouldn’t fear police officers nosing around indiscriminately unless they have a warrant. And if they poke around anyway, any evidence they find shouldn't be held against you. (In concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the main holding but was a lone voice announcing scepticism about the long-standing "exclusionary rule" that suppresses illegally grabbed evidence.)
The court had another reason to bar unwarranted searches of driveways: equitable treatment of people from different socio-economic backgrounds. Virginia’s proposed distinction between fixed structures and an open-air driveway—where warrantless searches are prohibited in the former, and permitted in the latter—”would grant constitutional rights to those persons with the financial means to afford residences with garages in which to store their vehicles” but leave people like Mr Collins open to police scrutiny whenever a curious officer wanders by. Justice Sotomayor capped this point with a quotation from an 1982 ruling penned by Justice John Paul Stevens: “[T]he most frail cottage in the kingdom is absolutely entitled to the same guarantees of privacy as the most majestic mansion”.
In a somewhat petulant dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that “[w]hat the police did in this case was entirely reasonable” while “[t]he court’s decision is not”. Any “ordinary person of common sense” would quarrel with the majority’s take, he wrote, since it’s obviously fine to pursue a lead up a driveway. The officer did not do “any harm” to Mr Collins or his girlfriend; he “did not damage any property or observe anything along the way he could not have seen from the street”. An ordinary observer would react to the ruling just as Charles Dickens’s character Mr Bumble “famously responded when told about a legal rule that did not comport with the reality of everyday life”. If that’s the way the law works, Mr Bumble said in “Oliver Twist”, “the law is a ass—a idiot”.
Having all but called his eight fellow justices unreasonable asses, Justice Alito closed on a somewhat more conciliatory note. “I...respectfully dissent”, he wrote.