Court Opinion

ID: 9489713
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:22:14.583348+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:40.445230
License: Public Domain

DAUGHTREY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting. At footnote eleven, the majority writes:
We wish to emphasize the fact-specific nature of this holding. By this decision, we do not mean to fashion a broad “nuisance abatement” exception to the general rule that warrantless entries into private homes are presumptively unreasonable.
As many a law professor has said, “Hard eases make bad law.” It is precisely because of this opinion’s far-reaching potential to undermine the sanctity of the home that I find that I must dissent.
The initial problem with the majority’s opinion is its insistence that the Fourth Amendment’s “reasonableness” clause dwarfs the warrant requirement. The majority hypothesizes that
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.
Despite the majority’s recognition that this approach is not “reconcilable with the prevailing judicial construction of the Fourth Amendment,” the majority then constructs an entire opinion around its view that the “reasonableness” clause outstrips the warrant requirement. When the majority “decline[s] to read [the] Amendment’s ‘reasonableness’ and warrant requirements as authorizing timely governmental responses only in cases involving life-threatening danger,” it ignores Fourth Amendment jurisprudential principles that have been firmly established for years.
Fourth Amendment jurisprudence recognizes that the protection the warrant requirement provides against police overreaching and abuse must give way to true exigencies. Such circumstances include “hot pursuit of a fleeing felon,” “imminent destruction of evidence,” prevention of a suspect’s escape, and risk of danger to the police or others. United States v. Johnson, 22 F.3d 674, 680 (6th Cir.1994). In all of these “exigent circumstances,” however, a great deal of harm would likely result from any delay in police action, and courts have therefore recognized that warrants are unnecessary in these instances. Refusing to recognize the common denominator in these situations, the majority elevates the desire to turn down loud music to the status of “exigent circumstance.”
The majority comments that
*1527nothing would have been gained if a disinterested magistrate had independently evaluated the Canton officers’ claim. * * * At most, a warrant could have specified the scope of a permissible entry, thereby ensuring that the officers’ intrusion was narrowly tailored to the limited purpose of ascertaining the source of the loud music and quelling it.
Despite the fact that the majority seems to view as trifling the benefit of limiting a search, this function goes to the heart of the warrant requirement. Although an inconvenience, the warrant requirement protects our homes from the otherwise unchecked investigative authority of the police.
For these reasons, I cannot concur in an opinion that reduces the significance of the warrant requirement to this extent. I cannot find “exigent circumstances” in the neighbors’ desire to quell the loud music emanating from the defendant’s house. When mere nuisance abatement rises to the level of an “exigent circumstance,” and the propriety of a search is judged by a post facto determination of the reasonableness of the search, the warrant requirement becomes a virtual nullity and the privacy interest in our homes exists only to the extent that our neighbors do not cry too loudly.