Court Opinion

ID: 9427386
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:20:33.562385+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:06.733965
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice White,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan, Mr. Justice Marshall, and Mr. Justice Stevens join, dissenting.
The Court today holds that the Fourth Amendment protects property, not people, and specifically that a legitimate occupant of an automobile may not invoke the exclusionary rule and challenge a search of that vehicle unless he happens to own or have a possessory interest in it.1 Though professing to acknowledge that the primary purpose of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches is the protection of privacy — not property — the Court nonetheless effectively ties the application of the Fourth Amendment and *157the exclusionary rule in this situation to property law concepts. Insofar as passengers are concerned, the Court’s opinion today declares an “open season” on automobiles. However unlawful stopping and searching a car may be, absent a possessory or ownership interest, no “mere” passenger may object, regardless of his relationship to the owner. Because the majority’s conclusion has no support in the Court’s controlling decisions, in the logic of the Fourth Amendment, or in common sense, I must respectfully dissent. If the Court is troubled by the practical impact of the exclusionary rule, it should face the issue of that rule’s continued validity squarely instead of distorting other doctrines in an attempt to reach what are perceived as the correct results in specific cases. Cf. Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465, 536 (1976) (White, J., dissenting).
I
Two intersecting doctrines long established in this Court’s opinions control here. The first is the recognition of some cognizable level of privacy in the interior of an automobile. Though the reasonableness of the expectation of privacy in a vehicle may be somewhat weaker than that in a home, see United States v. Chadwick, 433 U. S. 1, 12-13 (1977), “[a] search, even of an automobile, is a substantial invasion of privacy. To protect that privacy from official arbitrariness, the Court always has regarded probable cause as the minimum requirement for a lawful search.” United States v. Ortiz, 422 U. S. 891, 896 (1975) (footnote omitted). So far, the Court has not strayed from this application of the Fourth Amendment.2
The second tenet is that when a person is legitimately present in a private place, his right to privacy is protected from unreasonable governmental interference even if he does *158not own the premises. Just a few years ago, The Chief Justice, for a unanimous Court, wrote that the “[pjresence of the defendant at the search and seizure was held, in Jones, to be a sufficient source of standing in itself.” Brown v. United States, 411 U. S. 223, 227 n. 2 (1973); accord, id., at 229 (one basis for Fourth Amendment protection is presence “on the premises at the time of the contested search and seizure”) ; Jones v. United States, 362 U. S. 257 (1960) (individual legitimately present in friend’s apartment may object to search of apartment). Brown was not the first time we had recognized that Jones established the rights of one legitimately in a private area against unreasonable governmental intrusion. E. g., Combs v. United States, 408 U. S. 224, 227, and n. 4 (1972); Mancusi v. DeForte, 392 U. S. 364, 368, and n. 5 (1968); Simmons v. United States, 390 U. S. 377, 390 (1968). The Court in Jones itself was unanimous in this regard, and its holding is not the less binding because it was an alternative one. See Combs v. United States, supra, at 227 n. 4.
These two fundamental aspects of Fourth Amendment law demand that petitioners be permitted to challenge the search and seizure of the automobile in this case. It is of no significance that a car is different for Fourth Amendment purposes from a house, for if there is some protection for the privacy of an automobile then the only relevant analogy is between a person legitimately in someone else’s vehicle and a person legitimately in someone else’s home. If both strands of the Fourth Amendment doctrine adumbrated above are valid, the Court must reach a different result. Instead, it chooses to eviscerate the Jones principle, an action in which I am unwilling to participate.
II
Though we had reserved the very issue over 50 years ago, see Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132, 162 (1925), and never expressly dealt with it again until today, many of our opinions have assumed that a mere passenger in an automo*159bile is entitled to protection against unreasonable searches occurring in his presence. In decisions upholding the validity of automobile searches, we have gone directly to the merits even though some of the petitioners did not own or possess the vehicles in question. E. g., Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S. 218 (1973) (sole petitioner was not owner; in fact, owner was not in the automobile at all); Chambers v. Maroney, 399 U. S. 42 (1970) (sole petitioner was not owner); Husty v. United States, 282 U. S. 694 (1931). In Dyke v. Taylor Implement Mfg. Co., 391 U. S. 216 (1968), the Court, with seven Members agreeing, upset the admission of evidence against three petitioners though only one owned the vehicle. See id., at 221-222. Similarly, in Preston v. United States, 376 U. S. 364 (1964), the Court unanimously overturned a search though the single petitioner was not the owner of the automobile. The Court’s silence on this issue in light of its actions can only mean that, until now, we, like most lower courts,3 had assumed that Jones foreclosed the answer now supplied by the majority. That assumption was perfectly understandable, since all private premises would seem to be the same for the purposes of the analysis set out in Jones.
Ill
The logic of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence compels the result reached by the above decisions. Our starting point is “[t]he established principle . . . that suppression of the product of a Fourth Amendment violation can be successfully urged only by those whose rights were violated by the search itself . . . .” Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 166, 171— 172 (1969).4 Though the Amendment protects one’s liberty *160and property interests against unreasonable seizures of self5 and effects,6 “the primary object of the Fourth Amendment [is] . . . the protection of privacy.” Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U. S. 583, 589 (1974) (plurality opinion).7 And privacy is the *161interest asserted here,8 so the first step is to ascertain whether the premises searched “fall within a protected zone of privacy.” United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435, 440 (1976). My Brethren in the majority assertedly do not deny that automobiles warrant at least some protection from official interference with privacy. Thus, the next step is to decide who is entitled, vis-a-vis the State, to enjoy that privacy. The answer to that question must be found by determining “whether petitioner had an interest in connection with the searched premises that gave rise to 'a reasonable expectation [on his part] of freedom from governmental intrusion’ upon those premises.” Combs v. United States, 408 U. S., at 227, quoting Mancusi v. DeForte, 392 U. S., at 368 (bracketed material in original).
Not only does Combs supply the relevant inquiry, it also directs us to the proper answer. We recognized there that Jones had held that one of those protected interests is created by legitimate presence on the searched premises, even absent any possessory interest. 408 U. S., at 227 n. 4. This makes unquestionable sense. We have concluded on numerous occasions that the entitlement to an expectation of privacy does not hinge on ownership:
“What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in ■ his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. . . . But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 351-352 (1967).
In Alderman v. United States, supra, at 196, Mr. Justice Harlan, concurring in part and dissenting in part, noted that “our own past decisions . . . have decisively rejected the no*162tion that the accused must necessarily have a possessory interest in the premises before he may assert a Fourth Amendment claim.” That rejection should not have been surprising in light of our conclusion as early as 1960 that “it is unnecessary and ill-advised to import into the law surrounding the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures subtle distinctions, developed and refined by the common law in evolving the body of private property law which, more than almost any other branch of law, has been shaped by distinctions whose validity is largely historical.” Jones v. United States, 362 U. S., at 266.9 The proposition today overruled was stated most directly in Mancusi v. De-Forte, supra, at 368: “[T]he protection of the Amendment depends not upon a property right in the invaded place but upon whether the area was one in which there was a reasonable expectation of freedom from governmental intrusion.”
Prior to "Jones, the lower federal courts had based Fourth Amendment rights upon possession or ownership of the items seized or the premises searched.10 But Jones was foreshadowed by Mr. Justice Jackson’s remark in 1948 that “even a guest may expect the shelter of the rooftree he is under against criminal intrusion.” McDonald v. United States, 335 U. S. 451, 461 (1948) (Jackson, J., joined by Frankfurter, J., concurring). Indeed, the decision today is contrary to Mr. Justice Brandéis’ dissent in Olmstead v. United States, 277 *163U. S. 438, 478 (1928), expressing a view of the Fourth Amendment thought to have been vindicated by Katz. The majority in Olmstead found the Fourth Amendment inapplicable absent a trespass on property rights. 277 U. S., at 466. That is exactly what the Court holds in this case; but Mr. Justice Brandéis asserted 50 years ago that more than mere property rights are involved, and the Court's opinion in Katz re-emphasized that “ '[t]he premise that property interests control the right of the Government to search and seize has been discredited.' ” 389 U. S., at 353, quoting Warden v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 304 (1967). That logic led us inescapably to the conclusion that [n] o less than an individual in a business office, in a friend’s apartment, or in a taxicab, a person in a telephone booth may rely upon the protection of the Fourth Amendment.” 389 U. S., at 352 (footnotes omitted). And if all of those situations are protected, surely a person riding in an automobile next to his friend the owner, or a child or wife with the father or spouse, must have some protection as well.
The same result is reached by tracing other lines of our Fourth Amendment decisions. If a nonowner may consent to a search merely because he is a joint user or occupant of a “premises,” Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U. S. 731, 740 (1969),11 then that same nonowner must have a protected privacy interest. The scope of the authority sufficient to grant a valid consent can hardly be broader than the contours of protected privacy.12 *164And why should the owner of a vehicle be entitled to challenge the seizure from it of evidence even if he is absent at the time of the search, see Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443 (1971), while a nonowner enjoying in person, and with the owner’s permission, the privacy of an automobile is not so entitled?
In sum, one consistent theme in our decisions under the Fourth Amendment has been, until now, that “the Amendment does not shield only those who have title to the searched premises.” Mancusi v. DeForte, 392 U. S., at 367. Though there comes a point when use of an area is shared with so many that one simply cannot reasonably expect seclusion, see id., at 377 (White, J., dissenting); Air Pollution Variance Bd. v. Western Alfalfa Corp., 416 U. S. 861, 865 (1974), short of that limit a person legitimately on private premises knows the others allowed there and, though his privacy is not absolute, is entitled to expect that he is sharing it only with those persons and that governmental officials will intrude only with consent or by complying with the Fourth Amendment. See Mancusi v. DeForte, supra, at 369-370.13
It is true that the Court asserts that it is not limiting the Fourth Amendment bar against unreasonable searches to the protection of property rights, but in reality it is doing exactly that.14 Petitioners were in a private place with the permis*165sion of the owner, but the Court states that that is not sufficient to establish entitlement to a legitimate expectation of privacy. Ante, at 148. But if that is not sufficient, what would be? We are not told, and it is hard to imagine anything short of a property interest that would satisfy the majority. Insofar as the Court’s rationale is concerned, no passenger in an automobile, without an ownership or posses-sory interest and regardless of his relationship to the owner, may claim Fourth Amendment protection against illegal stops and searches of the automobile in which he is rightfully present. The Court approves the result in Jones, but it fails to give any explanation why the facts in Jones differ, in a fashion material to the Fourth Amendment, from the facts here.15 More importantly, how is the Court able to avoid answering the question why presence in a private place with the owner’s permission is insufficient? If it is “tautological to fall back on the notion that those expectations of privacy which are legitimate depend primarily on cases deciding exclusionary-rule issues in criminal cases,” ante, at 144 n. 12, then it surely must be tautological to decide that issue simply by unadorned fiat.
*166As a control on governmental power, the Fourth Amendment assures that some expectations of privacy are justified and will be protected from official intrusion. That should be true in this instance, for if protected zones of privacy can only be purchased or obtained by possession of property, then much of our daily lives will be unshielded from unreasonable governmental prying, and the reach of the Fourth Amendment will have been narrowed to protect chiefly those with posses-sory interests in real or personal property. I had thought that Katz firmly established that the Fourth Amendment was intended as more than simply a trespass law applicable to the government. Katz had no possessory interest in the public telephone booth, at least no more than petitioners had in their friend’s car; Katz was simply legitimately present. And the decision in Katz was based not on property rights, but on the theory that it was essential to securing “conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness” 16 that the expectation of privacy in question be recognized.17
At most, one could say that perhaps the Constitution provides some degree less protection for the personal freedom from unreasonable governmental intrusion when one does not have a possessory interest in the invaded private place. But that would only change the extent of the protection; it would not free police to do the unreasonable, as does the decision today. And since the accused should be entitled to litigate the application of the Fourth Amendment where his privacy interest is merely arguable,18 the failure to allow such litigation here is the more incomprehensible.
*167IV
The Court’s holding is contrary not only to our past decisions and the logic of the Fourth Amendment but also to the everyday expectations of privacy that we all share. Because of that, it is unworkable in all the various situations that arise in real life. If the owner of the car had not only invited petitioners to join her but had said to them, “I give you a temporary possessory interest in my vehicle so that you will share the right to privacy that the Supreme Court says that I own,” then apparently the majority would reverse. But people seldom say such things, though they may mean their invitation to encompass them if only they had thought of the problem.19 If the nonowner were the spouse or child of the owner,20 would the Court recognize a sufficient interest? If so, would distant relatives somehow have more of an expectation of privacy than close friends? What if the nonowner were driving with the owner’s permission? Would nonowning drivers have more of an expectation of privacy than mere passengers? What about a passenger in a taxicab? Katz expressly recognized protection for such passengers. Why should Fourth Amendment rights be present when one pays a cabdriver for a ride but be absent when one is given a ride by a friend?
The distinctions the Court would draw are based on relationships between private parties, but the Fourth Amendment is concerned with the relationship of one of those parties to *168the government. Divorced as it is from the purpose of the Fourth Amendment, the Court’s essentially property-based rationale can satisfactorily answer none of the questions posed above. That is reason enough to reject it. The Jones rule is relatively easily applied by police and courts; the rule announced today will not provide law enforcement officials with a bright line between the protected and the unprotected.21 Only rarely will police know whether one private party has or has not been granted a sufficient possessory or other interest by another private party. Surely in this case the officers had no such knowledge. The Court’s rule will ensnare defendants and police in needless litigation over factors that should not be determinative of Fourth Amendment rights.22
More importantly, the ruling today undercuts the force of the exclusionary rule in the one area in which its use is most certainly justified — the deterrence of bad-faith violations of the Fourth Amendment. See Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S., at 536-542 (White, J., dissenting). This decision invites police to engage in patently unreasonable searches every time an automobile contains more than one occupant. Should something be found, only the owner of the vehicle, or of the item, will have standing to seek suppression, and the evidence will *169presumably be usable against the other occupants.23 The danger of such bad faith is especially high in cases such as this one where the officers are only after the passengers and can usually infer accurately that the driver is the owner. The suppression remedy for those owners in whose vehicles something is found and who are charged with crime is small consolation for all those owners and occupants whose privacy will be needlessly invaded by officers following mistaken hunches not rising to the level of probable cause but operated on in the knowledge that someone in a crowded car will probably be unprotected if contraband or incriminating evidence happens to be found. After this decision, police will have little to lose by unreasonably searching vehicles occupied by more than one person.
Of course, most police officers will decline the Court’s invitation and will continue to do their jobs as best they can in accord with the Fourth Amendment. But the very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to answer the justified fear that governmental agents cannot be left totally to their own devices, and the Bill of Rights is enforceable in the courts because human experience teaches that not all such officials will otherwise adhere to the stated precepts. Some policemen simply do act in bad faith, even if for understandable ends, and some deterrent is needed. In the rush to limit the applicability of the exclusionary rule somewhere, anywhere, the Court ignores precedent, logic, and common sense to exclude the rule’s operation from situations in which, paradoxically, it is justified and needed.

 For the most part, I agree with the Court’s rejection, which was implicit in Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165 (1969), of petitioners’ secondary theory of target standing.

 See Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U. S. 266, 269 (1973) (“Automobile or no automobile, there must be probable cause for the search”).

 E. g., United States v. Edwards, 577 F. 2d 883 (CA5 1978) (en banc) ; Bustamonte v. Schneckloth, 448 F. 2d 699 (CA9 1971), rev’d on other grounds, 412 U. S. 218 (1973); United States v. Peisner, 311 F. 2d 94 (CA4 1962).

 Accord, Simmons v. United States, 390 U. S. 377, 389 (1968) (“[W]e have . . . held that rights assured by the Fourth Amendment are personal *160rights, and that they may be enforced by exclusion of evidence only at the instance of one whose own protection was infringed by the search and seizure”).

 See United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S. 873, 878 (1975) (“The Fourth Amendment applies to all seizures of the person, including seizures that involve only a brief detention short of traditional arrest”); Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).
Thus, petitioners of course have standing to challenge the legality of the stop, and the evidence found may be a fruit of that stop. See United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U. S. 543, 548, 556 (1976). Petitioners have not argued that theory here, perhaps because the justification necessary for such a stop is less than that needed for a search. See Terry v. Ohio, swpra. Nor have petitioners chosen to argue that they were “arrested” in constitutional terms as soon as they were ordered from the vehicle and that the search was a fruit of that infringement on their personal rights.

 See United States v. Lisk, 522 F. 2d 228 (CA7 1975), cert. denied, 423 U. S. 1078 (1976) (noted in 64 Geo. L. J. 1187 (1976)), after remand, 559 F. 2d 1108 (CA7 1977).
Petitioners never asserted a property interest in the items seized from the automobile. The evidence found was useful to the prosecution solely on the theory that petitioners’ possession of the items was probative of petitioners’ identity as the robbers. In Jones the Court recognized automatic standing in possessory crimes because the prosecution should not be allowed to take contradictory positions in the suppression hearing and then at trial, and also because of the dilemma that the defendant would face if he were forced to assert possession to challenge a search. 362 U. S., at 263. In Simmons we eliminated the dilemma by holding that the accused’s testimony at the suppression hearing could not be used against him at trial. 390 U. S., at 394. We also noted that the question whether automatic standing should be recognized for possessory evidence in nonposses-sory crimes was an open one. Id., at 391-392. Finally, in Brown v. United States, 411 U. S. 223, 229 (1973), we reserved the question whether prosecutorial self-contradiction by itself warrants automatic standing.

 See United States v. Chadwick, 433 U. S. 1, 7 (1977).

 See Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U. S., at 591 (plurality opinion) (“[I]nsofar as Fourth Amendment protection extends to a motor vehicle, it is the right to privacy that is the touchstone of our inquiry”).

 Accord, id., at 589 (“The common-law notion that a warrant to search and seize is dependent upon the assertion of a superior government interest in property, . . . and the proposition that a warrant is valid ‘only when a primary right to such search and seizure may be found in the interest which the public or the complainant may have in the property to be seized, or in the right to the possession of it,’ . . . were explicitly rejected as controlling Fourth Amendment considerations in Warden v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 302-306 (1967) ”).

 Knox, Some Thoughts on the Scope of the Fourth Amendment and Standing to Challenge Searches and Seizures, 40 Mo. L. Rev. 1, 36 n. 238 (1975).

 See also United States v. Matlock, 415 U. S. 164, 169, and 171 n. 7 (1974) (“The authority which justifies the third-party consent does not rest upon the law of property, with its attendant historical and legal refinements, . . . but rests rather on mutual use of the property by persons generally having joint access or control for most purposes, so that it is reasonable to recognize that any of the co-inhabitants has the right to permit the inspection in his own right and that the others have assumed the risk that one of their number might permit the common area to be searched”).

 Weinreb, Generalities of the Fourth Amendment, 42 U. Chi. L. Bev. 47, 54 (1974).

 See id., at 52 (“The fourth amendment assures us that when we are in a private place we are, so far as the government is concerned, in private”).

 The Court’s reliance on property law concepts is additionally shown by its suggestion that visitors could “contest the lawfulness of the seizure of evidence or the search if their own property were seized during the search.” Ante, at 142 n. 11. See also ante, at 149, and n. 16. What difference should that property interest make to constitutional protection against unreasonable searches, which is concerned with privacy? See Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 510-521 (1971) (White, J., with Burger, C. J., concurring and dissenting). Contrary to the Court’s suggestion, a legitimate passenger in a car expects to enjoy the privacy of the vehicle whether or not he happens to carry some item along for the *165ride. We have never before limited our concern for a person's privacy to those situations in which he is in possession of personal property. Even a person living in a barren room without possessions is entitled to expect that the police will not intrude without cause.

 Jones had permission to use the apartment, had slept in it one night, had a key, had left a suit and a shirt there, and was the only occupant at the time of the search. Ante, at 141 and 149. Petitioners here had permission to b@ in the car and were occupying it at the time of the search. Thus the only distinguishing fact is that Jones could exclude others from the apartment by using his friend’s key. But petitioners and their friend the owner had excluded others by entering the automobile and shutting the doors. Petitioners did not need a key because the owner was present. Similarly, the Court attempts to distinguish Katz on the theory that Katz had “shut the door behind him to exclude all others,” ante, at 149, but petitioners here did exactly the same. The car doors remained closed until the police ordered them opened at gunpoint.

 Olmstead v. United, States, 277 U. S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandéis, J., dissenting).

 See Bacigal, Some Observations and Proposals on the Nature of the Fourth Amendment, 46 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 529, 538 (1978).

 Investment Co. Institute v. Camp, 401 U. S. 617, 620 (1971); cf. ante, at 140.

 So far as we know, the owner of the automobile in question might have expressly granted or intended to grant exactly such an interest. Apparently not contemplating today’s radical change in the law, petitioners did not know at the suppression hearing that the precise form of the invitation extended by the owner to the petitioners would be disposi-tive of their rights against governmental intrusion.

 In fact, though it was not brought out at the suppression hearing, one of the petitioners is the former husband of the owner and driver of the car. He did testify at the suppression hearing that he was with her when she purchased it.

 Contrary to the assertions in the majority and concurring opinions, I do not agree that the Court’s rule is faithful to the purposes of the Fourth Amendment but reject it only because it fails to provide a “bright line.” As the discussion, supra, at 169-166, indicates, this dissent disagrees with the Court’s view that petitioners lack a reasonable expectation of privacy. The Court’s ipse dixit is not only unexplained but also is unjustified in light of what persons reasonably do, and should be entitled to, expect. My point in this portion of the opinion is that the Court’s lack of faithfulness to the purposes of the Fourth Amendment does not have even the saving grace of providing an easily applied rule.

 To say that the Fourth Amendment goes beyond property rights, of course, is not to say that one not enjoying privacy in person would not be entitled to expect protection from unreasonable intrusions into the areas he owns, such as his house. E. g., Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165 (1969).

 See Ingber, Procedure, Ceremony and Rhetoric: The Minimization of Ideological Conflict in Deviance Control, 56 B. U. L. Rev. 266, 304-305 (1976) (police may often be willing to risk suppression at the behest of some defendants in order to gain evidence usable against those without constitutional protection); White & Greenspan, Standing to Object to Search and Seizure, 118 U. Pa. L. Rev. 333, 349, 365 (1970) (same).