Opinion ID: 1491353
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: visits and searches

Text: The United States Supreme Court has stated that physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed. [4] And, in Payton v. New York, [5] the Court addressed the constitutionality of a New York statute authorizing police officers to enter private residences, by force, if necessary, without exigent circumstances or a warrant to make routine felony arrests and found the statute in violation of the Fourth Amendment: [A]ny differences in the intrusiveness of entries to search and entries to arrest are merely ones of degree rather than kind. The two intrusions share this fundamental characteristic: the breach of the entrance to an individual's home. The Fourth Amendment protects the individual's privacy in a variety of settings. In none is the zone of privacy more clearly defined than when bounded by the unambiguous physical dimensions of an individual's homea zone that finds its roots in clear and specific constitutional terms: The right of the people to be secure in their ... houses ... shall not be violated. That language unequivocally establishes the proposition that [a]t the very core [of the Fourth Amendment] stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. ... [T]he Fourth Amendment has drawn a firm line at the entrance to the house. [6] And more recently, in Kyllo v. United States, [7] the Court recognized the continuing sanctity of the home under the Fourth Amendment: In Silverman [, 365 U.S. 505, 81 S.Ct. 679, 5 L.Ed.2d 734 (1961)] ... we made it clear that any physical invasion of the structure of the home, by even a fraction of an inch was too much, and there is certainly no exception... for the officer who barely cracks open the front door and sees nothing but the non-intimate rug on the vestibule floor. In the home, our cases show, all details are intimate details, because the entire area is held safe from prying government eyes. [8] The Commonwealth argues that the trial court properly concluded that Officer Goins's initial entry into Appellant's residence is analytically distinct from a search for Fourth Amendment purposes because Officer Goins entered the home in connection with parole regulations requiring Appellant to [p]ermit his parole officer to visit his home and place of employment at any time. [9] As this is a question of law, we review de novo the trial court's legal conclusion that Officer Goins could enter Appellant's home without contemporaneous consent. We conclude that the trial court erred in its conclusion, and we hold that, although Appellant may have been required by the terms of his parole to permit his parole officer to visit him at his residence, Officer Goins had no lawful basis to enter Appellant's home after Appellant refused her entry. In the outset, we note our examination of this issue is complicated somewhat by the fact that the evidentiary record in this case is almost completely barren as to the nature and scope of a garden-variety at-home visit. Officer Goins testified that it was ordinary for a phalanx of other officers to accompany an officer performing an at-home visit to verify a parolee's residency, and later explained how the paperwork found in Appellant's bedroom was the type of information she used to verify residency. However, there was no testimony concerning departmental policies regarding such at-home visits, and, although the Commonwealth has cited us to the Department's Search and Seizure policy, no party to this appeal has cited us to any written policy regarding at-home visits. While counsel for both parties at the trial court level offered their opinions as to how a parole officer goes about verifying a parolee's residency during a home visit, the evidentiary hearing itself barely touched that question. We believe that we would completely abrogate a parolee's constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures if we were to endorse the Commonwealth's view that, regardless of whether a parole officer has reasonable suspicion that the parolee has violated the terms and conditions of his parole, the home visit parole condition authorizes a parole officer to enter a parolee's residence for the purpose of searching for indicia of residency. After all, what is the purpose of a policy on warrantless searches if Probation and Parole officers can rummage through a supervisee's belongings under the rubric of an at-home visit without any suspicionreasonable or otherwiseof wrongdoing on the part of the supervisee? Further, we find a significant difference between the language of the I agree that I may be subject to search condition and the condition at issue here that reads, [t]he parolee shall ... permit his parole officer to visit his home and place of employment at any time. While the interpretation of the the parolee shall ... permit mandatory parole condition is a question of first impression for this Court, other jurisdictions interpreting parallel provisions have suggested that entry into a residence in connection with a home visit requires contemporaneous consent at the time of entry [10] and have interpreted similar mandatory, shall permit language to mean that a person under supervision who refuses to grant consent for a home visit violates the terms of his or her release. [11] Additionally, although the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has held that [a] visit ... is not a search, [12] the authority the Court cited for that propositionand the authority cited in support of the same conclusion in the Commonwealth's brief Wyman v. James , [13] held that an at-home visit in connection with a determination of continued eligibility for Aid for Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits was not a search for Fourth Amendment purposes specifically because the AFDC recipient can deny the social worker's request for entry: [W]e are not concerned here with any search by the New York social service agency in the Fourth Amendment meaning of that term. It is true that the governing statute and regulations appear to make mandatory the initial home visit and the subsequent periodic contacts (which may include home visits) for the inception and continuance of aid. It is also true that the caseworker's posture in the home visit is perhaps, in a sense, both rehabilitative and investigative. But this latter aspect, we think, is given too broad a character and far more emphasis than it deserves if it is equated with a search in the traditional criminal law context. We note, too, that the visitation in itself is not forced or compelled, and that the beneficiary's denial of permission is not a criminal act. If consent to the visitation is withheld, no visitation takes place. The aid then never begins or merely ceases as the case may be. There is no entry in the home and there is no search. [14] As such, we find Officer Goins's intrusion into Appellant's residence fundamentally different from the AFDC home visits addressed in Wyman v. James , and believe a closer parallel exists between the entry questioned here and the administrative inspections to which the United States Supreme Court has found constitutional search and seizure provisions applicable. [15] Because Officer Goins entered Appellant's residence after Appellant denied her entry, we find that Officer Goins's intrusion into Appellant's residence transcended a mere visit [16] and became a search implicating the Fourth Amendment.