Opinion ID: 728738
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Warrantless Entries Under the Plain Language of the

Text: Fourth Amendment 20 The central question we confront in this appeal is whether the Canton police officers violated the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution when they entered Defendant's home without first securing a warrant. In order to resolve this question, we naturally look first to the language of the Amendment itself: 21 The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 22 U.S. Const. amend. IV. 23 At first glance, the language of the Fourth Amendment appears to suggest two potential shortcuts in our inquiry whether the officers' warrantless entry was lawful. First, because the Amendment speaks of searches and seizures, and because the officers apparently intended to conduct neither a search nor a seizure upon entering Defendant's home, one could argue that the Amendment simply does not apply to the entry at issue here. Next, based on the Amendment's division into two separate and apparently independent parts, the Reasonableness Clause and the Warrant Clause, one could posit that the officers' entry need only have been reasonable, and that the absence of a warrant for their entry does not bear on this reasonableness inquiry. However, our survey of the relevant case law reveals that neither of these two approaches is reconcilable with the prevailing judicial construction of the Fourth Amendment. 24 First, the Supreme Court has firmly and repeatedly rejected the proposition that the Fourth Amendment offers no protection against government entry into a home unless the entry is for the purpose of performing a traditional search or seizure. For example, in Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523, 526, 534, 87 S.Ct. 1727, 1729, 1733, 18 L.Ed.2d 930 (1967), the Court found that an administrative inspection for possible violations of a city's housing code was a significant intrusion[ ] upon the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment. In so holding, the Court expressly overturned its earlier ruling in Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360, 367, 79 S.Ct. 804, 809, 3 L.Ed.2d 877 (1959), that administrative inspections touch at most upon the periphery of the important interests safeguarded by the Fourteenth Amendment's protection against official intrusion. The Camara Court reasoned that official intrusions of any sort implicate Fourth Amendment values:We may agree that a routine inspection of the physical condition of private property is a less hostile intrusion than the typical policeman's search for the fruits and instrumentalities of crime. For this reason alone, Frank differed from the great bulk of Fourth Amendment cases which have been considered by this Court. But we cannot agree that the Fourth Amendment interests at stake in these inspection cases are merely peripheral. It is surely anomalous to say that the individual and his private property are fully protected by the Fourth Amendment only when the individual is suspected of criminal behavior. For instance, even the most law-abiding citizen has a very tangible interest in limiting the circumstances under which the sanctity of his home may be broken by official authority, for the possibility of criminal entry under the guise of official sanction is a serious threat to personal and family security. And even accepting Frank 's rather remarkable premise, inspections of the kind we are here considering do in fact jeopardize self-protection interests of the property owner. Like most regulatory laws, fire, health, and housing codes are enforced by criminal processes. In some cities, discovery of a violation by the inspector leads to a criminal complaint. 25 Camara, 387 U.S. at 530-31, 87 S.Ct. at 1731-32 (footnotes omitted). 26 More recently, in Michigan v. Tyler, 436 U.S. 499, 501, 506, 98 S.Ct. 1942, 1945, 1948, 56 L.Ed.2d 486 (1978), the Court held that the Fourth Amendment applied to the search of a burned furniture store by firefighters in order to determine the origin of the blaze. The Court stated: 27 [T]here is no diminution in a person's reasonable expectation of privacy nor in the protection of the Fourth Amendment simply because the official conducting the search wears the uniform of a firefighter rather than a policeman, or because his purpose is to ascertain the cause of a fire rather than to look for evidence of a crime, or because the fire might have been started deliberately. Searches for administrative purposes, like searches for evidence of crime, are encompassed by the Fourth Amendment. 28 436 U.S. at 506, 98 S.Ct. at 1948; see also Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Ass'n, 489 U.S. 602, 617, 109 S.Ct. 1402, 1413, 103 L.Ed.2d 639 (1989) (holding that drug and alcohol testing of railroad employees is governed by the Fourth Amendment); New York v. Burger, 482 U.S. 691, 693, 699, 107 S.Ct. 2636, 2639, 2642, 96 L.Ed.2d 601 (1987) (finding that the Fourth Amendment governs a warrantless search of an automobile junkyard); New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 333-36, 105 S.Ct. 733, 738-40, 83 L.Ed.2d 720 (1985) (holding that the Fourth Amendment applies to searches conducted by public school officials). 29 Thus, in the instant matter, the actions of the Canton police officers cannot altogether escape scrutiny under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether those actions were primarily directed at abating loud noise rather than enforcing the law. Indeed, Camara leaves no room for a contrary conclusion. Because Defendant was cited for disturbing the peace in violation of a Canton ordinance, the officers' entry ultimately served a law enforcement purpose. Consequently, the entry challenged Defendant's self-protection interests as described in Camara, and thereby implicated the Fourth Amendment's strictures against certain types of unreasonable government action. Furthermore, Camara and its progeny dictate the broader conclusion that the Fourth Amendment would govern the officers' entry into Defendant's home even if that entry neither served nor was intended to serve any law enforcement purpose whatsoever. The Amendment's protections were triggered solely by the governmental intrusion into Defendant's home. 30 Next, any attempt to completely divorce the Fourth Amendment's Warrant Clause from our inquiry into the reasonableness of the entry into Defendant's home likewise runs afoul of Supreme Court precedent. Although the express language of the Fourth Amendment would appear to support such a construction, 3 the Court has steadfastly refused to view the Amendment's two clauses in isolation from one another. Rather, the Court has repeatedly found that the reasonableness of a government intrusion must be evaluated with the Warrant Clause in mind. 31 The Court's view of the relationship between the two clauses derives primarily from its analysis of the framers' intent in enacting the Fourth Amendment. In particular, the Court has frequently noted the American colonists' repugnance to the English practice of issuing general writs of assistance to authorize searches of private homes at the unchecked discretion of government officials. See, e.g., Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 583, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 1378, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980) (It is familiar history that indiscriminate searches and seizures conducted under the authority of 'general warrants' were the immediate evils that motivated the framing and adoption of the Fourth Amendment. (footnote omitted)); United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 7-8, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 2481-82, 53 L.Ed.2d 538 (1977); Stanford v. Texas, 379 U.S. 476, 481-82, 85 S.Ct. 506, 509-10, 13 L.Ed.2d 431 (1965); Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360, 363-65, 79 S.Ct. 804, 807-08, 3 L.Ed.2d 877 (1959); Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 624-25, 6 S.Ct. 524, 529, 29 L.Ed. 746 (1886). Citing this history, Justice Frankfurter forcefully explained why, in his view, the Fourth Amendment's Reasonableness and Warrant clauses are inextricably interrelated: 32 One cannot wrench unreasonable searches from the text and context and historic content of the Fourth Amendment. It was the answer of the Revolutionary statesmen to the evils of searches without warrants and searches with warrants unrestricted in scope. Both were deemed unreasonable. Words must be read with the gloss of the experience of those who framed them.... When the Fourth Amendment outlawed unreasonable searches and then went on to define the very restricted authority that even a search warrant issued by a magistrate could give, the framers said with all the clarity of the gloss of history that a search is unreasonable unless a warrant authorizes it, barring only exceptions justified by absolute necessity. 33 United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 70, 70 S.Ct. 430, 436-37, 94 L.Ed. 653 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting). 34 This view of the relationship between the Fourth Amendment's Reasonableness and Warrant Clauses has led the Supreme Court to declare, as a basic principle of Fourth Amendment law, that searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable. Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 586, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 1380, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980) (footnote omitted). In stating this general rule, the Payton Court found that the physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed, and reasoned that the warrant procedure minimizes the danger of needless intrusions of that sort. 445 U.S. at 585-86, 100 S.Ct. at 1379-80 (quoting United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297, 313, 92 S.Ct. 2125, 2134, 32 L.Ed.2d 752 (1972)). 35 Even where a search or seizure does not involve entry into a private residence, the Court has found that the Warrant Clause bears upon the reasonableness of the government action. For instance, in United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 11, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 2483, 53 L.Ed.2d 538 (1977), the Court concluded that a warrantless search of a locked footlocker was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The Government had argued that the absence of a warrant should not affect the reasonableness inquiry in searches occurring outside the home, where less significant privacy values are at stake. 433 U.S. at 6-7, 97 S.Ct. at 2481. The Court rejected this argument, relying in part on the strong historical connection between the Warrant Clause and the initial clause of the Fourth Amendment, which draws no distinction among 'persons, houses, papers, and effects' in safeguarding against unreasonable searches and seizures. 433 U.S. at 8, 97 S.Ct. at 2482. Thus, the Court concluded that the Warrant Clause provides vital safeguards against unreasonable searches, whether in or out of the home. 433 U.S. at 9-11, 97 S.Ct. at 2482-83; see also Camara, 387 U.S. at 531-33, 87 S.Ct. at 1732-33 (finding that the warrant machinery contemplated by the Fourth Amendment serves important purposes in the context of administrative searches). But see South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 375-76, 96 S.Ct. 3092, 3100, 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976) (holding that a warrantless caretaking search of a lawfully impounded automobile does not violate the Fourth Amendment); United States v. Watson, 423 U.S. 411, 96 S.Ct. 820, 46 L.Ed.2d 598 (1976) (finding that a warrantless arrest in a public place based on probable cause is not unreasonable). 36 In concluding that the Warrant Clause bears on reasonableness under a wide variety of circumstances, the Supreme Court has frequently cited Justice Jackson's eloquent explanation of the important purposes served by the warrant requirement: 37 The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime. Any assumption that evidence sufficient to support a magistrate's disinterested determination to issue a search warrant will justify the officers in making a search without a warrant would reduce the Amendment to a nullity and leave the people's homes secure only in the discretion of police officers. Crime, even in the privacy of one's own quarters, is, of course, of grave concern to society, and the law allows such crime to be reached on proper showing. The right of officers to thrust themselves into a home is also a grave concern, not only to the individual but to a society which chooses to dwell in reasonable security and freedom from surveillance. When the right of privacy must reasonably yield to the right of search is, as a rule, to be decided by a judicial officer, not by a policeman or Government enforcement agent. 38 Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14, 68 S.Ct. 367, 369, 92 L.Ed. 436 (1948) (footnotes omitted). This vision of the purposes behind the warrant requirement continues to guide the Court: 39 An essential purpose of a warrant requirement is to protect privacy interests by assuring citizens subject to a search or seizure that such intrusions are not the random or arbitrary acts of government agents. A warrant assures the citizen that the intrusion is authorized by law, and that it is narrowly limited in its objectives and scope. A warrant also provides the detached scrutiny of a neutral magistrate, and thus ensures an objective determination whether an intrusion is justified in any given case. 40 Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Ass'n, 489 U.S. 602, 621-22, 109 S.Ct. 1402, 1415-16, 103 L.Ed.2d 639 (1989) (citations omitted). 41 This case law unequivocally precludes us from treating the Reasonableness and Warrant Clauses of the Fourth Amendment as involving entirely separate inquiries. Rather, under existing precedent, the officers' failure to obtain a warrant before entering Defendant's home defeats the straightforward proposition that their conduct satisfied the Fourth Amendment solely by virtue of its reasonableness. Admittedly, such a claim holds great appeal to common sense, particularly under the circumstances presented here. However, our survey of the case law that has identified and shaped fundamental Fourth Amendment principles leads us to the following rule: In the absence of a warrant authorizing the officers' entry into Defendant's home, the Government must overcome the presumption that this entry was unreasonable. 42