Opinion ID: 3030698
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Privacy Interests of Parolees

Text: [4] We begin our analysis by rejecting Appellants’ contention that Moreno, by the very nature of his status as a parolee, had no Fourth Amendment rights at all. We rejected an identi- 2 More recently, in United States v. Kincade, 379 F.3d 813 (9th Cir. 2004) (en banc), petition for cert. filed, (U.S. Nov. 15, 2004) (No. 047253), we were unable to resolve the proper test to be applied to determine whether an involuntary blood draw from a supervised releasee for a DNA databank violated the Fourth Amendment. See id. at 842 n.1 (Reinhardt, J., dissenting). 3 Because the arrest and search at issue in this case were clearly for law enforcement purposes, the “special needs” doctrine does not apply. See Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 532 U.S. 67, 83 n.20 (2001) (“In none of our previous special needs cases have we upheld the collection of evidence for criminal law enforcement purposes.”); City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 38 (2000) (observing that the “special needs” doctrine has never been applied where the purpose of the search was “to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing”); see also Kincade, 379 F.3d at 854 (Reinhardt, J., dissenting) (“Never in over two hundred years of history has the Supreme Court approved of a suspicionless search designed to produce ordinary evidence of criminal wrongdoing for use by the police.”). Even assuming that parole supervision can qualify as a “special need,” Appellants cannot reasonably contend that the search was conducted for the purpose of supervising parolees, see Griffin, 483 U.S. at 873, because they did not know that Moreno was a parolee at the time of the incident. 2668 MORENO v. BACA cal argument three decades ago in Latta. See Latta, 521 F.2d at 248 (“It is . . . too late in the day to assert that searches of parolees by their parole officers present no Fourth Amendment issues.”). The Fourth Amendment by its explicit terms applies to all persons, regardless of their status under the law. In Griffin, the Supreme Court confronted the question of whether and to what extent the Fourth Amendment limits the government’s ability to search probationers, who, like parolees, are offered conditional liberty as an alternative to incarceration. A Wisconsin regulation permitted any probation officer to search a probationer’s home without a warrant so long as there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that contraband would be found. 483 U.S. at 871. Acting in response to a tip that the probationer kept guns in his apartment, but without a warrant, a probation officer searched Griffin’s home and recovered a gun there. The probationer moved to suppress the gun in a subsequent felony trial in state court, but the motion was denied. The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the “reasonable grounds” standard satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s “reasonableness” requirement. Id. at 873. The Court began by recognizing that “[a] probationer’s home, like anyone else’s, is protected by the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that searches be “reasonable.” Id. Although the Court acknowledged that a search of a home must generally be authorized by a warrant supported by probable cause, it reasoned that Wisconsin’s interest in supervising its probationers constituted a “special need” beyond ordinary law enforcement, see T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 351, which permitted a “degree of impingement on privacy that would not be constitutional if applied to the public at large.” 483 U.S. at 875. Probation is simply one point (or more accurately, one set of points) on a continuum of possible punishments ranging from solitary confinement in a maximum security facility to a few hours of mandatory community service. A number of different options lie between those extremes, including confinement MORENO v. BACA 2669 in a medium- or minimum-security facility, work release programs, “halfway houses,” and probation — which itself can be more or less confining depending on the number and severity of restrictions imposed . . . . To a greater or lesser degree, it is always true of probationers (as we have said it to be true of parolees) that they do not enjoy the “absolute liberty to which every citizen is entitled, but only . . . conditional liberty properly dependent on observance of special [probation] restrictions.” Id. at 874 (quoting Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 480 (1972)) (statutory citation omitted) (first ellipsis added; other alterations in the original). The Court recently reaffirmed the principle that probation “significantly diminish[es],” but does not extinguish, an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Knights, 534 U.S. at 119. In Knights, a probationer had explicitly agreed to submit his person and property to a search “at anytime, with or without a search warrant, warrant of arrest, or reasonable cause” as a condition of his release. Id. at 114. The probationer and his colleague were suspected of having vandalized several Pacific Gas and Electric (“PG&E”) facilities in connection with an ongoing dispute between Knights and the company over theft of services. A detective assigned to investigate noticed that acts of vandalism tended to coincide with the probationer’s court dates in the theft-of-services dispute, and decided to place the probationer’s home under surveillance. In the bed of a truck parked in the petitioner’s driveway, he saw a gasoline can, a molotov cocktail, and brass padlocks matching the description of padlocks pried from a vandalized PG&E transformer vault. At one point he observed the probationer’s colleague walk out of the house with what appeared to be pipe bombs. Knowing that the probationer was subject to the condition that his property may be searched without cause, the officer conducted a warrantless search of Knight’s home. 2670 MORENO v. BACA The probationer successfully moved to suppress the evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, and we affirmed, but the Supreme Court reversed. The Court concluded that the search “was reasonable under our general Fourth Amendment approach of ‘examining the totality of the circumstances.’ ” Id. at 118 (quoting Robinette, 519 U.S. at 39). The Court reasoned that the probationer’s agreement to submit to suspicionless searches “significantly diminished [his] reasonable expectation of privacy” and that the state had a significant interest in supervising probationers, who were more likely than ordinary citizens to violate the law. Id. at 119-21. Nonetheless, the Court still held that reasonable suspicion was required to search the probationer’s house, stating that a “lesser than probable-cause standard” satisfied the Fourth Amendment “when the balance of governmental and private interests makes such a standard reasonable.” Id. at 121. Relying on the fact that the detective had a “reasonable suspicion” that evidence of the PG&E crimes would be found, the court held that the search did not violate the Fourth Amendment because there was “enough likelihood that criminal conduct is occurring that an intrusion on the probationer’s significantly diminished privacy interests is reasonable.” Id. [5] Because of the similarity of their relationship vis-a-vis the government, we have treated parolees and probationers essentially the same for the purpose of Fourth Amendment analysis. See Kincade, 379 F.3d at 817 n.2 (“Our cases have not distinguished between parolees, probationers, and supervised releasees for Fourth Amendment purposes.”); United States v. Davis, 932 F.2d 752, 758 (9th Cir. 1991) (“We do not believe the distinction between the status of parolee and that of a probationer is constitutionally significant for purposes of evaluating the scope of a search.”); United States v. Harper, 928 F.2d 894, 896 n.1 (9th Cir. 1991) (“Nor do we see a constitutional difference between probation and parole for purposes of the fourth amendment.”). Like probationers, parolees are entitled to “conditional liberty properly dependent on observance of special . . . restrictions.” Morrisey, 408 MORENO v. BACA 2671 U.S. at 480; see also Penn. Bd. of Probation & Parole v. Scott, 524 U.S. 357, 365 (1998) (describing parole as a condition in which “the State accords a limited degree of freedom in return for the parolee’s assurance that he will comply with the often strict terms and conditions of his release”). Whereas a probationer’s release is premised on the idea that he or she can serve a meaningful sentence without being incarcerated, a parolee’s release is designed to provide a transition period between incarceration and complete freedom. But, in either case, some degree of privacy and autonomy is inherent in the offender’s status. The liberty of a parolee enables him to do a wide range of things open to persons who have never been convicted of any crime. The parolee has been released from prison based on an evaluation that he shows reasonable promise of being able to return to society and function as a responsible, self-reliant person. Subject to the conditions of his parole, he can be gainfully employed and is free to be with family and friends and to form the other enduring attachments of normal life. Morrisey, 408 U.S. at 480; see also Latta, 521 F.2d at 250 (holding that “the parolee’s interest in maintaining his personal privacy, even as against his parole officer, is in many respects like that of other citizens”). Thus, the condition of a parolee is “very different from that of confinement in a prison,” and it “includes many of the core values of unqualified liberty.” Morrisey, 408 U.S. at 480. [6] The conditions of Moreno’s parole are only marginally relevant to our analysis. At most, the parole agreement is a “salient circumstance” which we must weigh in determining whether the search and seizure in this case was reasonable. Knights, 534 U.S. at 118. In Knights, the court held that the offender’s probation condition, in which he agreed to submit to suspicionless searches, “significantly diminished [his] rea2672 MORENO v. BACA sonable expectation of privacy” because the “probation order clearly expressed the search condition and [he] was unambiguously informed of it.” Id. at 120. In this case, by contrast, although Moreno’s parole agreement provides that officers may conduct a warrantless search and seizure of his person, it does not permit officers to conduct a suspicionless arrest and seizure.4 Random searches not premised on individualized suspicion are not contemplated by the parole conditions.5 Cf. Rowe v. Lamb, 130 F.3d 812, 814 (8th Cir. 1997) (holding that a warrantless search of a probationer’s home was reasonable where the probationer agreed as a term of his probation to be subject to warrantless searches with or without probable cause). Moreno cannot be accused of manifesting a subjective expectation that he would be vulnerable to suspicionless searches simply because he signed the parole agreement. And his agreement to submit to warrantless searches cannot be said to reduce his privacy rights so severely as to make a suspicionless search reasonable.