Opinion ID: 785658
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Plaintiff's Reasonable Expectation of Privacy

Text: 16 To prove an illegal search claim, a party must demonstrate (1) that he had an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to consider reasonable and (2) that he had acted in a way with respect to the property in question that indicated a subjective expectation of privacy. United States v. Perea, 986 F.2d 633, 639 (2d Cir.1993). In O'Connor v. Ortega, the Supreme Court recognized that public employees frequently have substantial privacy expectations in private property maintained at their workplaces. 480 U.S. 709, 721, 107 S.Ct. 1492, 94 L.Ed.2d 714 (O'Connor, J., plurality opinion); see id. at 730, 107 S.Ct. 1492 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment); id. at 737, 107 S.Ct. 1492 (Blackmun, J., dissenting). At the same time, however, the Court acknowledged that [t]he operational realities of the workplace ... may make some employees' expectations of privacy unreasonable when an intrusion is by a supervisor rather than a law enforcement official. Id. at 717, 107 S.Ct. 1492 (plurality opinion) (emphasis in original); see also id. at 737, 107 S.Ct. 1492 (Blackmun, J., dissenting). As the plurality observed, some workplaces are continually entered by fellow employees and other visitors during the workday for conferences, consultations, and other work-related visits, under which circumstances no expectation of privacy is reasonable. Id. at 718, 107 S.Ct. 1492; accord Leventhal, 266 F.3d at 73; see also Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.); United States v. Buettner-Janusch, 646 F.2d 759, 766 (2d Cir. 1981) (holding that a professor has no reasonable expectation of privacy in enclosed areas of a university lab that are shared with another professor and a student research assistant). 17 As the district court observed, many persons — students, colleagues, custodians, administrators, parents, and substitute teachers — had access to Shaul's classroom, Shaul, 218 F.Supp.2d at 270, and Shaul himself acknowledges that his personal possessions were largely commingled with school materials in a haphazard fashion throughout the room. Brief of Appellant at 8. But nothing in the record on appeal indicates that school administrators, custodians, parents, or students routinely looked through these materials or through Shaul's desk or file cabinets, particularly not his locked file cabinet, for which it appears he had the only key. Apparently, fellow teachers may have sought necessary supplies and instructional materials when using the classroom, but such occasional access, by itself, does not lead to a conclusion as a matter of law that a teacher in good standing retains absolutely no privacy interest in the desk and files in his classroom. See Leventhal, 266 F.3d at 74 (holding that co-workers' occasional retrieval of documents from plaintiff's computer did not extinguish a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of the machine; employer searches must be frequent and extensive or employer must have a stated policy notifying employee that he can have no privacy expectation). As this Circuit has noted in Leventhal, the `[c]onstitutional protection against unreasonable searches by the government does not disappear merely because the government has the right to make reasonable intrusions in its capacity as employer.' Id. (quoting O'Connor, 480 U.S. at 717-18, 107 S.Ct. 1492 (plurality opinion quoting concurring opinion of Scalia, J.)). 18 Whatever reasonable expectation of privacy Shaul may have had in his classroom while he was a teacher in good standing, we nevertheless agree with the district court that he had no such expectation on January 30, 1999, by which date Shaul had (1) been suspended from teaching and barred from his classroom, (2) surrendered the key to the classroom's locked file cabinet at the same time that he declined to retrieve his personal property from the classroom, and (3) been afforded a second opportunity to spend an hour and a half removing personal items from the classroom. 19 Certainly, the discharge or suspension of an employee greatly reduces — if not eliminates — his reasonable expectation of privacy in his former workplace. This conclusion is particularly warranted on the facts of this case where on January 19, 1999, Shaul was asked to surrender any school keys in his possession at the same time that he was given the opportunity to remove any personal belongings from his classroom. Taken together, the demand and the invitation served as constructive notice that Shaul could have no reasonable expectation of privacy in anything that he did not remove from his former classroom after that date. Cf. Leventhal, 266 F.3d at 74 (noting that employee had been given no notice that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer). By deliberately declining to retrieve his belongings on January 19th, while at the same time surrendering the key to his locked file cabinet, Shaul relinquished whatever expectation of privacy he formerly had in the materials contained in the classroom, including those in the locked file cabinet. See generally United States v. Jimenez, 789 F.2d 167, 170 (2d Cir.1986) (holding that defendant who relinquished key to apartment upon termination of each use had no reasonable expectation of privacy and hence no Fourth Amendment seizure claim); United States v. Blanco, 844 F.2d 344, 349 (6th Cir.1988) (holding that renter who gives up his only set of keys without taking any steps to maintain control thereby gives up expectation of privacy in premises). 20