Court Opinion

ID: 9491043
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:02:04.625796+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:28.569946
License: Public Domain

ROVNER, Circuit Judge,
with whom POSNER, Chief Judge, and RIPPLE, MANION, and DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting.
In my dissent to the panel opinion in this case, I set forth my view that Joseph Red-mon retained a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of two garbage cans situated immediately adjacent to the door of his attached garage — clearly within the curti-lage of his home — and that as a result of that reasonable expectation of privacy, the war-rantless search of the cans by local police violated Redmon’s Fourth Amendment rights. See United States v. Redmon, 117 F.3d 1036, 1040-44 (7th Cir.) (Rovner, J., dissenting), vacated, reh’g en banc granted, 122 F.3d 1081 (7th Cir.1997). I explained there that the two facts which had led the panel majority to reach a contrary conclusion — that Redmon shared the driveway with his neighbor, and that the walkway leading to Redmon’s front door could be reached only by traversing the driveway — were not sufficiently significant to overcome this court’s view in United States v. Hedrick, 922 F.2d 396 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 502 U.S. 847, 112 S.Ct. 147, 116 L.Ed.2d 113 (1991), that “ ‘garbage cans placed next to the house or garage are not so accessible to the public that any privacy expectations are objectively unreasonable.’ ” Redmon, 117 F.3d at 1044 (Rov-ner, J., dissenting) (quoting Hedrick, 922 F.2d at 400). The panel majority’s decision, I observed, meant “that the citizens of this circuit may only protect their garbage from warrantless police searches by storing it inside their homes.” Id. at 1040 (Rovner, J., dissenting).
Having now reheard Redmon’s appeal en banc, a majority of our number has reached the same conclusion as the panel — that Red-mon’s conviction must be affirmed — although a slightly different rationale is now employed to support that decision. But the new facts emphasized by the majority opinion today still do not persuade me that the warrantless search of Redmon’s garbage was proper. And despite my colleagues’ best efforts to limit the reach of their decision to the specific facts of Redmon’s ease, it is clear that the implications on law enforcement activity .in this circuit will be far-reaching. The majority is understandably hesitant to say it, but in my view, its decision can only mean that nearly any search of a garbage can outside awaiting collection, regardless of where on private property the can may be stored, implicates no privacy interest receiving protection under the Fourth Amendment. That startling conclusion simply is not supported by the Supreme Court’s lone decision in this area, or by the earlier garbage-search cases of this or any other circuit. My colleagues, *1134in fact, recognize that their decision today goes further toward limiting the protectable privacy interests citizens enjoy in garbage stored on their private property than any circuit decision has gone before. (See ante, Maj. Op. at 1112.) Because I view this extension of the existing case law to be both unwarranted under the law and unwise in practice, I respectfully dissent.
I.
The first question that must be asked is whether Redmon’s garbage cans were within the curtilage of his home, for if they were not, then I would agree that Redmon lacked a protectable privacy interest in the cans’ contents. See California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 37, 42, 108 S.Ct. 1625, 1627, 1629-30, 100 L.Ed.2d 30 (1988); Hedrick, 922 F.2d at 398-99; see also Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 177, 104 S.Ct. 1735, 1740-41, 80 L.Ed.2d 214 (1984) (government intrusion upon “open fields” not an illegal search proscribed by the Fourth Amendment). But as I explained in my dissent to the panel opinion, and as both Chief Judge Posner (ante, Posner, C.J., dissenting, at 1129 & 1132) and Judge Manion (ante, Manion, J., dissenting, at 1132) observe in their dissenting opinions here, these cans clearly were within the cur-tilage of Redmon’s home. See Redmon, 117 F.3d at 1040-41 (Rovner, J., dissenting). They were just outside the door of a garage leading directly to Redmon’s living quarters, on a driveway that Redmon shared with his neighbor. Because the cans clearly were within the curtilage, Redmon enjoyed a heightened expectation of privacy in the cans’ contents. See California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207, 213, 106 S.Ct. 1809, 1812-13, 90 L.Ed.2d 210 (1986).
As Chief Judge Posner persuasively argues, the curtilage inquiry should be the determinative one in cases like this, but the majority makes scant mention of the curti-lage doctrine and appears to stop short of definitively deciding whether Redmon’s cans were located inside or outside his curtilage. Even if the majority is correct that “[t]he mere intonation of curtilage ... does not end the inquiry” (ante, Maj. Op. at 1112 (internal quotation omitted); see also Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 213, 106 S.Ct. at 1812-13), it cannot ignore that the Supreme Court has considered the curtilage question to be of particular importance where the police have conducted a warrantless search on private property, for it is within the curtilage that an individual’s privacy interests are “most heightened.” E.g., United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 300-01, 107 S.Ct. 1134, 1139-40, 94 L.Ed.2d 326 (1987); Dow Chem. Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 235 & 237, 106 S.Ct. 1819, 1825 & 1826, 90 L.Ed.2d 226 (1986); Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 213, 106 S.Ct. at 1812-13. Under the Supreme Court’s cases, then, the curtilage question must be addressed and resolved in the first instance.1
*1135It is possible, of course, that the majority may actually be holding, albeit obliquely, that Redmon’s cans were outside his home’s curti-lage, for its opinion references the four factors the Supreme Court directed us to consider in resolving that question (see Dunn, 480 U.S. at 301, 107 S.Ct. at 1139-40) before abruptly declaring that “our decision in Red-mon passes all the tests.” (Ante, Maj. Op. at 1115.) Judge Evans, meanwhile, writes separately to express more explicitly his view that the cans at issue, although immediately adjacent to Redmon’s home, were beyond its curtilage. (Ante, Evans, J., concurring, at 1128.) I have some difficulty reconciling either conclusion with the Supreme Court’s view that the area immediately surrounding a private home is part of its curtilage. See Dunn, 480 U.S. at 300, 107 S.Ct. at 1139 (curtilage extends to the “area immediately surrounding a dwelling house”); Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 212, 106 S.Ct. at 1812 (back yard immediately adjacent to a private home is within its curtilage); Dow Chem., 476 U.S. at 237 n. 4, 106 S.Ct. at 1826 n. 4 (“We find it important that this is not an area immediately adjacent to a private home, where privacy expectations are most heightened.” (emphasis in original)); Oliver, 466 U.S. at 180, 104 S.Ct. at 1742 (“the common law distinguished ‘open fields’ from the ‘curtilage,’ the land immediately surrounding and associated with the home”); see also, e.g., Work v. United States, 243 F.2d 660, 662 (D.C.Cir.1957) (trash can located under a porch in close proximity to the home was within the curti-lage). In fact, those very same Supreme Court cases led this court to declare in Hed-rick that “the yard of a residential home is within the curtilage.” 922 F.2d at 399. And if the yard is within a home’s curtilage, then certainly the portion of the driveway abutting the door of an attached garage is as well. (Cf. ante, Manion, J., - dissenting, at 1133 (Redmon’s curtilage “effectively paralleled his property line.”).)
I find particular support for that conclusion in the Supreme Court’s Dunn decision, where the Court was called upon to decide whether the curtilage of a home extended to the area adjacent to a separate barn located some fifty yards beyond a fence surrounding the home. 480 U.S. at 296, 107 S.Ct. at 1137. Although the Court concluded that the area at issue was beyond the home’s curtilage, it did so only after rejecting the government’s assertion that “the curtilage should extend no farther than "the nearest fence surrounding a fenced house.” Id. at 301 n. 4, 107 S.Ct. at 1140 n. 4 (internal quotation omitted). The Court explained:
[T]he primary focus is whether the area in question harbors those intimate activities associated with domestic life and the priva-cies of the home. Application of the Government’s “first fence rule” might well lead to diminished Fourth Amendment protection in those eases where a structure lying outside a home’s enclosing fence was used for such domestic activities.
Id. ■ Thus, although the Supreme Court has suggested that an area lying outside a home’s enclosing fence may still be considered a part of its curtilage, a majority of this court apparently has concluded that the area immediately surrounding the home itself is not, and without even addressing the uses to which the homeowner actually has made of that area.2 With respect, I submit that most urban dwellers would be shocked to learn that the portion of a driveway immediately adjacent to the garage door is considered by this court to be an “open field,” rather than a part of the “area around the home to which the activity of home life extends.” Oliver, 466 U.S. at 182 n. 12, 104 S.Ct. at 1743 n. 12. Neither the citizenry of this country nor the Supreme Court of the United States would, I believe, countenance such a conclusion.
*1136II.
Nor am I persuaded by the majority’s attempt to liken the circumstances of this case to those in California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 108 S.Ct. 1625, 100 L.Ed.2d 30 (1988), where the Supreme Court held that there is no objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in garbage left for collection at the curb of a public street. I explained in my dissent to the panel opinion that Greenwood does not control this case because the Court dealt there only with garbage left at curbside, outside the curtilage of the home, and did not purport to address a situation like this, where Redmon placed his closed garbage containers at a location on his driveway immediately adjacent to the door of his attached garage, far from the public street. Redmon, 117 F.3d at 1040-41 (Rovner, J., dissenting).
The majority rather grudgingly acknowledges that this case “is not strictly a curbside collection” (ante, Maj. Op. at 1113 (emphasis added)), but then intimates that the conclusion it reaches follows naturally from Greenwood. The logic goes something like this: although “not strictly a curbside collection,” this case is for all practical purposes like a curbside collection in that a local ordinance prohibited Redmon from placing his cans at curbside, where the police would be entitled to search them, and required that the cans instead be stored on the property itself; Redmon’s “curb,” then, “was necessarily not at curbside, but on his joint walk-driveway.” (Id. at 1114; see also id. at 1113 (“Redmon, in effect, chose the front of the joint garage on the shared driveway-sidewalk to be his curb for garbage pickup purposes.”); ante, Flaum, J., concurring, at 1123 (“[Ojnce Redmon left the trash for collection in his driveway, it occupied a space that ... was not much different than the curbside collection point chosen in other cases.”).) This is puzzling logic at best. I suppose the majority must mean that because Redmon was unable to store his garbage at a place where the police could legally search it (i.e., the curb), the police were entitled to search the garbage at the place he actually stored it, despite the fact that the garbage was clearly within his property line and in fact directly next to his home. It is as if our garbage cans come equipped with an attached curb so that they will be considered “curbside” regardless of where a municipality may require that they be stored. The majority’s reasoning makes sense, of course, only if we assume that the police are entitled to one free shot at a citizen’s garbage before it reaches the hands of the collector. Clearly they are not. Any entitlement the police may have to search the garbage is dependent upon its location on the defendant’s property, as the location is in this circumstance the primary indicator of whether the property owner intended to relinquish his legitimate expectation of privacy. By storing his cans so close to his home — within its curtilage, I submit— Redmon indicated that he in fact did not intend to relinquish his privacy interest. And just because Redmon may have authorized a garbage collector to encroach upon his property to reach the cans does not entitle the police to do the same. See 1 Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment § 2.6(e), at 595 (3d ed. 1996) (“There is no principle in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to the effect that the police are free to do what some individual has been authorized to do.” (emphasis in original)); see also ante, Posner, C.J., dissenting, at 1130. In short, there simply is no persuasive way that Redmon’s case can be likened to Greenwood;' in no sense can it be considered a “curbside collection.”
III.
I must add a word as well about the “abandonment” theory that has now crept into the majority’s analysis. (See ante, Maj. Op. at 1113 & 1114; see also ante, Flaum, J., concurring, at 1125-1128.) In United States v. Kramer, 711 F.2d 789, 792 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 962, 104 S.Ct. 397, 78 L.Ed.2d 339 (1983), a panel of this court relied on an abandonment theory to hold that “the special protection the Fourth Amendment accords people in their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects’ does not extend to their discarded garbage.” Yet the Kramer panel made that observation in the context of a case like Greenwood, where garbage had been placed at the side of a road for removal by a private collector. Id. The majority intimates that the Kramer analysis was approved by the Supreme Court in Greenwood *1137(ante, Maj. Op. at 1113 & 1114), but the Court only cited Kramer amongst a laundry list of decisions that had similarly rejected Fourth Amendment challenges to garbage searches. See 486 U.S. at 41^12,108 S.Ct. at 1629-30. The Court certainly did not embrace the abandonment theory articulated in Kramer, and the dissenting Justices in fact praised the majority for “properly rejecting] the State’s attempt to distinguish trash searches from other searches on the theory that trash is abandoned and therefore not entitled to an expectation of privacy.” Id. at 51, 108 S.Ct. at 1634 (Brennan, J., dissenting)3 Justice Brennan pointed out, as Chief Judge Posner does here, that “a defendant’s property interest in trash does not settle the matter for Fourth Amendment purposes, for the reach of the Fourth Amendment is not determined by state property law.” Id. (Brennan, J., dissenting) (internal quotation omitted); see ante, Posner, C.J., dissenting, at 1128 & 1130-1131.4
Greenwood’s treatment of the abandonment rationale that previously had been embraced by this court in Kramer and by a number of other federal and state courts led a post -Greenwood panel of this court to conclude that “the continued viability of an abandonment approach is questionable.” Hedrick, 922 F.2d at 398. Today’s majority retreats from that statement, but in a very equivocal way, observing that “whether the abandonment approach still remains questionable is likewise questionable.” (Ante, Maj. Op. at 1114.) Yet the majority fails to offer any explanation for this apparent change in course. It does not, for example, cite to any post-Greenwood decision easting any doubt on Hedrick’s statement, nor does it suggest that the Supreme Court has had anything further to say on the matter. Indeed, today’s majority offers not the slightest explanation as to why the Hedrick panel may have been wrong. The majority instead intimates only that Redmon himself injected the abandonment issue into these proceedings by contending below that his garbage had not been abandoned, and that even if it had, that was not the proper focus of the inquiry required by Greenwood. (Id. at 1114.) But I am at a loss to understand how either of those arguments could have somehow injected what we previously considered to be an all but irrelevant factor back into the mix, particularly when Redmon himself asserted that the entire abandonment issue was not a proper consideration under Greenwood. After noting that Redmon had raised the issue, however, my colleagues go on to conclude that Redmon’s garbage in fact had been abandoned and that “Redmon’s abandonment intent should ... be considered along with other factors in making the Fourth Amendment determination.” (Id.; see also Flaum, J., Concurring, at 1127-28.) Hedrick itself explained why that is wrong:
[That approach] is not consistent with Supreme Court protection of the curtilage and with its opinion in Greenwood. For instance, the Supreme Court continues to discuss the protection accorded the curti-lage even though it has rejected the notion that property law defines the contours of Fourth Amendment protection. A determination, however, that garbage placed in cans for ultimate collection is unprotected by the Fourth Amendment would allow police officers to inspect cans placed next to the garage or the house itself without any showing of probable cause or any warrant, and without regard to the accessibility of the cans, to the public as a whole. This result would be inconsistent with the purpose of the Fourth Amendment to protect the home and the area surrounding it from arbitrary searches. Moreover, such a holding would be inconsistent with the *1138language in Greenwood [itself]. The Greenwood Court did not base its decision solely upon the conveyance of the garbage to the collector. This was true even though the garbage collectors in that ease actually collected the respondents’ garbage at the usual time, and then conveyed it to the police. Finally, the Court has never held that the intent to convey an object or conversation to a third party renders any expectations of privacy unreasonable simply because the third party could then convey the object or information to the police.
922 F.2d at 399-400; see also id. at 401 (Cudahy, J., dissenting) (“the rationale that explains the absence of an expectation of privacy at the curbside is not that the garbage is soon to be picked up but simply that it is near the road.” (emphasis in original)); LaFave, § 2.6(e), at 593 (“the mere fact that a citizen elects to dispose of his garbage in the customary way by making it available for pickup by a municipal or privately-retained hauler is no basis for concluding that his expectation of privacy as to that garbage, is unjustified”). As Hedrick recognized, the relevant question under Greenwood is not whether Redmon intended to convey his garbage to a third party, but rather whether “the garbage was readily accessible to the public so as to render any expectation of privacy objectively unreasonable.” Hedrick, 922 F.2d at 400. As I éxplained in my dissent to the panel opinion, Redmon’s garbage cans, located immediately adjacent to the door of a garage leading directly into his home and almost thirty feet from a public street, were not so accessible. See Redmon, 117 F.3d at 1042-44 (Rovner, J., dissenting).
rv.
Although the Fourth Amendment issue raised in this appeal was deemed significant enough to warrant the full court’s consideration, the majority does not attempt to fashion any guiding legal principle to focus the inquiry in future cases. In contrast to Chief Judge Posner, who persuasively advocates a bright-line curtilage rule, the majority adopts a more nebulous balancing approach, mentioning various factors without providing any legal framework under which to consider them. Indeed, the principle that emerges most strongly from the majority opinion is one that it specifically disclaims — that garbage placed outside the home for collection by a third party receives no Fourth Amendment protection at all. Despite all of its signals to that effect, the majority tells us that today’s decision does not mean “that anybody’s garbage cans placed on the driveway adjacent to his or her garage, regardless of the other facts and circumstances, can henceforth be searched without a warrant.” (Ante, Maj. Op. at 1111.) My colleagues no doubt intended this statement to provide some comfort to the citizens of this circuit who will be affected by their decision, but I fear that the statement will only add to the reigning confusion, for the majority fails to articulate what considerations may cause it to reach a different conclusion in a subsequent ease. Although the police and ordinary citizens are therefore left to guess, I suppose they must be content with the assurance that the members of this court will know unconstitutional police work when they see it. (Cf. ante, Maj. Op. at 1113 (“Not all good police work is unconstitutional.”).) Yet as the Supreme Court explained in New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454, 459-60, 101 S.Ct. 2860, 2864, 69 L.Ed.2d 768 (1981), “[w]hen a person cannot know how a court will apply a settled principle to a recurring factual situation, that person cannot know the scope of his constitutional protection, nor can a policeman know the scope of his authority.” See also Oliver, 466 U.S. at 181-82, 104 S.Ct. at 1742-43 (“This Court repeatedly has acknowledged the difficulties created for courts, police, and citizens by an ad hoe, case-by-case definition of Fourth Amendment standards to be applied in differing factual circumstances. The ad hoc approach not only makes it difficult for the policeman to discern the scope of his authority, it also creates a danger that constitutional rights will be arbitrarily and inequitably enforced.” (citations omitted)).
Despite their various disclaimers, it is clear that my colleagues’ decision today will have broad-ranging implications. From this day forward, the subjective expectation of privacy we all have enjoyed in the yards and driveways surrounding our homes will no longer be considered objectively reasonable. *1139Essentially, then, any privacy interest we had in those areas has been forever lost. That is the cost we must all bear today from the majority’s insistence on sustaining a single drug conviction.
I respectfully dissent.

. In concluding that the cans here were outside the curtilage, Judge Evans similarly fails to address the uses to which Redmon may have put the area of his driveway where the garbage cans were located. Judge Evans instead muddies the issue by likening Redmon's townhouse complex to a multi-unit apartment building. (Ante, Evans, J., concurring, at 1128.) The comparison is not apt. Redmon lived in a townhouse, with his own garage, his own front door, his own walkway to that door, his own yard, and a driveway that he shared with just one neighbor. As our Chief Judge explains, Judge Evans’ position essentially means that Redmon and other members of our society who reside in attached houses, row houses, and other urban dwellings have no curti-lage at all. (Ante, Posner, C.J., dissenting, at 1132.)

. The Greenwood majority did not disavow that it had done so. Indeed, I would have expected the majority’s rationale in Greenwood to have been much different had the Court simply found the property to be abandoned. See LaFave, § 2.6(c), at 595.

. See also LaFave, § 2.6(c), at 591-92 ("A justified expectation of privacy may exist as to items which have been abandoned in the property law sense, just as it is true that no such expectation may exist on some occasions even though the property has not been abandoned. This is because under Katz [v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967),] the question is not whether there has been abandonment in the property law sense, ... but rather whether there has been abandonment of a reasonable expectation of privacy as to the area searched or the property seized.” (internal quotation omitted)).