OFF THE WIRE
The court's majority said the search was illegal, but Justice Samuel Alito disagreed while Justice Clarence Thomas questioned whether Supreme Court limitations on illegally obtained evidence even apply to the states.
The Supreme Court ruled overwhelmingly in favor of a criminal defendant Tuesday in holding that a Virginia search of a man's motorcycle — parked in his driveway — was unconstitutional.
Nonetheless, the court's two most conservative justices — Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — laid out a divergent pair of visions for restricting legal rights against police searches: one that would limit people's protections against illegal searches conducted by state and local police and one that would provide less protection under the Fourth Amendment than any other current justice believes exists.
The case presented a rather straightforward question about what Fourth Amendment protections exist when a person's vehicle is searched when parked on private property adjacent to their house.
Police had probable cause to believe that Ryan Austin Collins' motorcycle — covered by a tarp at the top of the driveway in a space "enclosed on two sides by a brick wall ... and on the third side by the house" — was stolen. After walking up the driveway, uncovering the motorcycle, and getting the license and vehicle identification number, police confirmed that suspicion and arrested Collins.
The decision (link is external) was a lopsided one, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing for the 8–1 majority that the warrantless search of Collins' motorcycle was not allowed under the "automobile exception" to the general requirement that police need a warrant to conduct a search at a person's home.
"[T]he ability visually to observe an area protected by the Fourth Amendment does not give officers the green light physically to intrude on it," Sotomayor wrote.
Under the "automobile exception," police generally can search a car if they have probable cause without needing to seek a warrant. This is so, the Supreme Court has ruled, because automobiles are so easily moved and because of "the pervasive regulation of vehicles" by governments. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled the exception applied here, making the search of Collins' motorcycle a legal one.
Calling it an "easy case," however, Sotomayor wrote that "the scope
of the automobile exception extends no further than the automobile
itself." Because a person's house and the nearby space — referred to as
curtilage — are independently protected spaces under the Fourth
Amendment, generally requiring a warrant to search, the "automobile
exception" doesn't somehow make it OK to access that property to search
it without a warrant.
"The automobile exception does not afford the necessary lawful right
of access to search a vehicle parked within a home or its curtilage
because it does not justify an intrusion on a person’s separate and
substantial Fourth Amendment interest in his home and curtilage," she
concluded for the court.
Thomas joined Sotomayor's opinion — he agreed that the police
officer's actions clearly violated the Fourth Amendment — but
nonetheless laid out a view that would fundamentally alter the rules
that have applied to state and local policing in the United States since
John F. Kennedy was president.
Turning to originalism and the Supremacy Clause, Thomas took issue
with the effect of the exclusionary rule on the case. The rule was
established by the Supreme Court and says that evidence obtained in
violation of the Fourth Amendment is suppressed — unable to be admitted —
in any criminal trial.
Thomas presented a vision of the law that would allow states to admit
evidence at trial that was obtained in violation of the Fourth
Amendment. Noting that the "Founders would not have understood the logic
of the exclusionary rule," because there was no such practice at the
time, Thomas wrote that Supreme Court rulings made clear the rule is
"not required by the Constitution." As such, he wrote, the Supremacy
Clause — which raises federal law over state laws — should not apply to
this situation, since the exclusionary rule is not based on the
Constitution or a federal law.
Thus, Thomas wrote, "I am skeptical of this Court’s authority to impose the exclusionary rule on the States" — a decision (link is external) the court made in 1961.
And he agreed with the court's ruling.
Alito was the only justice who believed the court got the Fourth Amendment ruling itself wrong.
In his dissenting opinion, Alito laid out a view of the Fourth
Amendment that potentially could — if ever given effect — allow for a
wider swath of warrantless police searches.
"[T]he Court’s strikingly unreasonable decision is based on a
misunderstanding of Fourth Amendment basics," he wrote, focusing on the
item searched — the motorcycle — and not the location of the search.
"[W]e should ask whether the reasons for the 'automobile exception'
are any less valid in this new situation," he wrote, referencing the
court's earlier cases on the topic. "Is the vehicle parked in the
drive-way any less mobile? Are any greater privacy interests at stake?
If the answer to those questions is 'no,' then the automobile exception
should apply. And here, the answer to each question is emphatically
'no.'"
While Sotomayor noted that, under Alito's logic, the police officer
in this case could have entered the home itself if he saw the motorcycle
in the living room from the street, Alito himself insisted otherwise,
writing that "a case-specific inquiry regarding the degree of intrusion on privacy is entirely appropriate when the motor vehicle to be searched is located on private property."
It was not clear what actual rule that would establish or how this
sliding-rule application of the general warrant requirement for home
searches would apply in other cases, but Alito summed up his own general
view about Collins' case in the opening to his dissent: "The Fourth
Amendment prohibits 'unreasonable' searches. What the police did in this
case was entirely reasonable."
