Court Opinion

ID: 9490587
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:48:08.638438+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:11.440556
License: Public Domain

HEANEY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The Supreme Court and this court have long recognized that the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures of a home or an apartment apply with equal force to a person’s privacy in a temporary dwelling place such as a hotel room. Stoner v. California, 376 U.S. 483, 490, 84 S.Ct. 889, 893-94, 11 L.Ed.2d 856 *1126(1964); United States v. Rambo, 789 F.2d 1289, 1295 (8th Cir.1986). Applying those precedents to this case, the dog sniff outside of Roby’s hotel room violated his right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Employing the so-called “plain smell” doctrine and focusing on the corridor outside Roby’s hotel room, the majority substantially erodes the reasonable expectation of privacy that we have always recognized. While the use of trained dogs to detect narcotics is justifiable in airports or other public areas, see United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 707, 103 S.Ct. 2637, 2644-45, 77 L.Ed.2d 110 (1983) (airports); United States v. Harvey, 961 F.2d 1361, 1363 (8th Cir.1992) (overhead baggage area on commercial bus); it should not be extended to permit governmental intrusion into the privacy of a hotel room. The random patrolling of hotel hallways with trained police dogs, in my judgment, goes against the personal and societal values protected by the Fourth Amendment. Without the dog’s alert at Roby’s hotel room door, the government has as much conceded that they would not have had probable cause for the warrant. I thus respectfully dissent from Parts II.C-E of the majority’s opinion.
As the majority recognizes, reasonable expectations of privacy vary according to the context of the area searched. See O’Connor v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709, 719, 107 S.Ct. 1492, 1498-99, 94 L.Ed.2d 714 (1987). Yet in implying that this case falls under a “plain smell” warrant exception, the majority cites several cases, all of which involve extremely different factual contexts. In Harvey, where our court held that the defendants had no expectation of privacy in the “ambient air surrounding their luggage,” 961 F.2d at 1363, the defendants were traveling on a Greyhound bus and had placed their luggage in an overhead baggage area that had no individual compartments and that could not be locked to the exclusion of other passengers. Id. at 1362. In other words, the dog sniff in Harvey took place in a highly public area and in the context of public transportation where, consistent with what the Supreme Court has said about airports, there is a strong governmental interest in preventing the flow of narcotics into distribution channels. See Place, 462 U.S. at 704, 707, 103 S.Ct. at 2643, 2644-45 (permitting the dog sniff of luggage in an airport, a public place where drug courier activity is “inherently transient”). Nor is this case like Horton v. Goose Creek Indep. Sch. Dist., 690 F.2d 470, 477 (5th Cir.1982), in which the Fifth Circuit held that the dog-sniffing of student lockers in public hallways and automobiles parked on public parking lots did not constitute a search.
Rather, this case is much closer to United States v. Thomas, 757 F.2d 1359, 1367 (1985), in which the Second Circuit held that the use of a dog to sniff for narcotics outside an apartment constituted a search that, in the absence of probable cause and a warrant, violated the Fourth Amendment. Recognizing the heightened privacy interest that persons have in their homes, the Second Circuit noted that a practice that is not intrusive in a public airport can certainly be intrusive when employed at a person’s home. Id. at 1366. The court decided that the defendant had a “legitimate expectation that the contents of his closed apartment would remain private, and such contents could not be ‘sensed’ from outside his door” without the significant enhancement provided by the trained dog. Id. at 1367.
Similarly, guests of a hotel have a legitimate expectation that the contents of their closed hotel room will remain private to some degree. See Stoner, 376 U.S. at 490, 84 S.Ct. at 893-94 (hotel rooms protected under the Fourth Amendment to the same extent as homes); Rambo, 789 F.2d at 1295 (same). By its nature, of course, a hotel is less private than an apartment or a home. Nonetheless, hotel personnel limit access to the rooms and hotel guests, in large part, maintain control over who enters their rooms. While the corridor of a hotel is shared by guests and hotel personnel alike, it is not a public area akin to an airport or a commercial bus. Neither guests nor the hotel personnel expect to have police officers, much less large German Shepherds, patrolling the hotel hallways. The majority, in highlighting that the hotel corridor significantly limits Roby’s expectation of privacy in his room seems ready to accept that persons who live in apartment complexes similarly have a limited expectation of privacy in their rented home because other people have access to *1127the apartment hallways. I do not believe that the Fourth Amendment protects only those persons who can afford to live in a single-family residence with no surrounding common space.
In my view, Roby had a legitimate expectation of privacy in his closed hotel room. Without the impermissible intrusion into that privacy — the dog-sniffing from the hallway— I do not believe that the officers had probable cause to search his hotel room. I therefore would reverse the district court’s denial of Roby’s motion to suppress the evidence seized from his room.