Opinion ID: 214065
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: kentucky’s interest

Text: The majority explains that Kentucky has an interest in preventing pretrial releasees from cheating on drug tests. “‘[I]f the government’s interest in conducting the tests is sufficient to allow testing in the first place, certainly the government has a valid interest in ensuring that those tests produce valid and reliable results.’” Maj. Op. at 9 (quoting Norris, 2009 WL 3334900, at ).1 However, the government’s interest in incrementally greater accuracy is not compelling. The government has no reason to suspect that Norris and others like him, who have never been accused of a drug offense, will falsify a drug test. That difference is reflected in the case on which the majority relies, BNSF Railway Co. v. U.S. Department of Transportation, 566 F.3d 200 (D.C. Cir. 2009). In BNSF, the challengers to the drug-testing protocol were public-transit employees engaged in “safety-sensitive duties” and had failed or refused a past drug test. Id. at 202. Norris has no similar history. Individualized suspicion is not required for special-needs searches, but as the suspicion of wrongdoing among a category of people becomes more slight, the government’s interest wanes. A more closely analogous case is Scott, in which the Ninth Circuit held that the government may not drug test pretrial releasees under either a special-needs approach or the more general totality-of-the-circumstances test. 450 F.3d at 868–75. When considering the government’s interest, the court found that “the connection between the object of the [drug] test (drug use) and the harm to be avoided (nonappearance in court) is tenuous. . . . [T]he government has produced nothing to suggest [that failure to appear is a] common enough problem[] to justify intruding on the privacy rights of every single defendant out on pretrial release.” Id. at 870. The majority opinion distinguishes Scott by arguing that Scott challenged the constitutionality of drug testing pretrial releasees regardless of method. But that distinction strengthens Norris’s claim. The privacy interest that Norris has asserted is more narrow than Scott’s, and the government’s 1 This logic must apply only to the identification of a valid interest, not the conclusion that the interest renders the government’s action reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Otherwise, the government could put forward a constitutionally adequate interest and procedure, substitute a far more egregious procedure that slightly enhances reliability, and be exempt from Fourth Amendment challenges to that egregious procedure. No. 09-6252 Norris v. Premier Integrity Solutions, Inc. Page 18 interest conflicts less: even if Norris succeeds in his suit, Kentucky can still drug test pretrial releasees using alternative procedures that better protect privacy. Even crediting Kentucky with a greater interest in ensuring appearance at trial than the federal government produced in Scott, see KY. REV. STAT. ANN. § 431.064(2)(e) (permitting “[a]n order prohibiting [pretrial releasees] from possession or consumption of alcohol or controlled substances” “to ensure the[ir] appearance . . . at a subsequent court proceeding”), Kentucky’s interest in the added protection that direct observation affords is not overpowering.