Court Opinion

ID: 9515182
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 22:54:25.476412+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:06:25.988365
License: Public Domain

SABERS, Justice
(dissenting).
[¶ 58.] When police do “garbage pulls,” they are not merely poking through ho-ho wrappers and soda cans. They are delving into the intimate details of a person’s life; details that reasonable people normally shield from public view and details that are often otherwise shielded by state or federal law. Connie and Rick Schwartz had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their garbage that society is willing to recognize. The fallacy of the plurality opinion’s determination to the contrary is easily seen in the papers and personal effects that can be found in a typical garbage bag.
[¶ 59.] Information that may be gleaned from a household’s waste is so deeply personal that an average South Dakotan would be mortified to know that their local police or sheriffs department was examining its contents. Simply giving thought to what could be in a citizen’s garbage confirms why their expectation of privacy is reasonable. In a month’s worth of garbage, one could find information regarding the citizen’s financial affairs and legal affairs. The government would also become privy to information regarding the citizen’s health, including diagnoses, prescriptions and treatment choices. All of this information is vigorously protected by privacy laws. A citizen’s sexual health and proclivities can often be determined by their garbage. Dietary and hygiene practices are revealed in a person’s garbage. Personal correspondence and writings are often discarded specifically for the purpose of preventing others from seeing them. Political *446and religious beliefs can often be determined by picking through a person’s garbage. Rummaging in a person’s garbage long enough will eventually reveal the person’s shopping habits, typical phone contacts, entertainment preferences and receipt of professional services, for example from a therapist, attorney, accountant or doctor.
[¶ 60.] In short, by digging through a person’s garbage over a period of time, virtually every detail of that person’s life will eventually be revealed, because, as has often been noted, nearly every activity in life generates some waste. See e.g. Smith v. State, 510 P.2d 793, 798 (Alaska 1973). I dissent from the plurality opinion because its determination that South Dako-tans do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in all of this information defies reason and undercuts the protections of the warrant requirement of Art. VI, § 11 of the South Dakota Constitution.
[¶ 61.] United States Supreme Court decisions establish “no more than the floor of constitutional protection.” State v. Hempele, 120 N.J. 182, 576 A.2d 793, 800 (1990). As the Court itself noted in Greenwood, “individual States may surely construe their own constitutions as imposing more stringent constraints on police conduct than does the Federal Constitution.” Greenwood, 486 U.S. at 43, 108 S.Ct. at 1630, 100 L.Ed.2d at 39. This Court is charged with the heavy responsibility of ensuring that our state constitution is upheld and that South Dakota citizens’ reasonable expectations of privacy are protected. We may not abdicate this responsibility by merely coming to the conclusion that many other courts agree with the Supreme Court’s decision in Greenwood. After all, many state courts agreed with the Supreme Court decisions of Bred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. Bred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 19 How. 393, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1856); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S.Ct. 1138, 41 L.Ed. 256 (1896). As the consequences of those cases so painfully illustrated, the pluralities’ agreement with a case is an inadequate measure of its propriety.
[¶ 62.] Several courts have disagreed with the Supreme Court’s determination in Greenwood. We should join with those courts in rejecting the analysis and conclusions of that opinion and hold that this warrantless search was unconstitutional. The rationale underlying the decision in Greenwood is simply unsupportable and should not be relied upon to create South Dakota constitutional law.
[¶ 63.] As its primary support, the plurality opinion relies upon Greenwood’s statement that garbage left on the side of a street is “readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public” and therefore loses its expectation of privacy. This analysis completely misses the point of the Fourth Amendment inquiry, which is whether the government has the ability to engage in a warrantless search of the citizen’s papers and effects. “The fundamental purpose of the state constitution is to govern the relationship between the people and their government rather than to govern the relationship between private parties[.]” State v. Boland, 115 Wash.2d 571, 800 P.2d 1112, 1114 (1990) (additional citation omitted). Therefore, when contemplating whether a government action violates the Fourth Amendment, the acts or possible acts of non-governmental scavengers and snoops are entirely irrelevant. As Justice Brennan noted in his dissent,
The mere possibility that unwelcome meddlers might open and rummage through containers does not negate the expectation of privacy in its contents any more than the possibility of a burglary negates an expectation of privacy in the *447home; or the possibility of a private intrusion negates an expectation of privacy in an unopened package; or the possibility that an operator will listen in on a telephone conversation negates an expectation of privacy in the words spoken on the telephone.
Greenwood, 486 U.S. at 54, 108 S.Ct. at 1636, 100 L.Ed.2d at 45-46 (Brennan, J., dissenting). Furthermore, a person can maintain a privacy interest in something partially exposed to the public. For example, a car left on the street is accessible to snoops, children, scavengers and animals, but that does not mean an officer has the right to open the door of the vehicle and poke around for evidence. See also Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). As the New Jersey Supreme Court noted:
Unreasonable police searches are often impermissible in areas accessible to other third parties. For example, a government employee can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her office even though “it is the nature of government offices that others — such as fellow employees, supervisors, consensual visitors and the general public — may have frequent access to an individual’s office.” The constitutional prohibition on unreasonable searches does not disappear merely because the government has the right to make reasonable intrusions in its capacity as employer.
Hempele, 576 A.2d at 804 (internal citations omitted). “Although a person may realize that an unwelcome scavenger might sort through his or her garbage, ‘such expectations would not necessarily include a detailed, systemized inspection of the garbage by law enforcement personnel.’ ” Id. (quoting Smith, 510 P.2d at 803 (Rabinowitz, C.J., dissenting)). Moreover, a citizen who observed a scavenger or snoop picking through their garbage would feel free to tell the scavenger to get their nose out of the garbage. A citizen who observed a police officer rummaging through their garbage would feel no such power. Finally, as many writers have noted, leaving garbage out to be collected is similar to leaving correspondence in a mail box at the curb. Although a snoop or scavenger could easily take the letter from the mailbox, society, the Legislature, and the Court readily acknowledge an expectation of privacy in that correspondence.
[¶ 64.] Neither a neighbor nor the police have a right to go through one’s garbage whether sitting on the driveway or on the curb. This Court should refuse to create constitutional precedent based on the flawed reasoning that partial exposure of property to the public negates Fourth Amendment protections. The long term consequences of such a decision will be a devastating erosion of Fourth Amendment rights. Likewise, the Court should not accept the remaining justification relied upon by the plurality opinion.
[¶ 65.] The plurality opinion holds that the defendants lost any reasonable expectation of privacy because they voluntarily handed the garbage over to a trash collector “who might himself have sorted through respondents’ trash or permitted others, such as the police, to do so.” Plurality opinion, ¶ 14. This reasoning is flawed and contrary to the protections of Art. VI, § 11 of the South Dakota Constitution.
[¶ 66.] First, when a person places their garbage for collection, their expectation is that “the contents of [the] garbage [would be] intermingled with other refuse in the well of the truck and ultimately dumped into a central collection place where the forces of nature would destroy them.” State v. Goss, 150 N.H. 46, 834 A.2d 316, 319 (N.H.2003) (additional quotation omitted). In other words, citizens *448assume that the garbage collector will see the outside of an opaque garbage bag for the amount of time it takes him or her to throw it into the back of a truck, at which point the garbage takes on some anonymity. The garbage is then buried in the midst of other garbage bags and dumped into a landfill where it loses its identity as belonging to the citizen. By assuming that citizens hand their garbage over with the expectation that the collector will peruse the contents, or permit the police to do so, the plurality opinion completely suspends disbelief to reach a desired legal result.
[¶ 67.] Second, as other courts have noted, this reasoning relies on three assumptions: 1) that the collector has the right to look through the garbage bags; 2) that the collector had sufficient authority over the bag to consent to police search; and 3) that “because garbage collectors can consent to a search, the police need neither a warrant nor consent for a search.” Hempele, 576 A.2d at 805. As the New Jersey Supreme Court noted, “the first [assumption] is debatable. The second is dubious. The third is downright disturbing.” Id. We need not dwell for any significant amount of time on the first two, as the third is so obviously contrary to the Fourth Amendment it should be rejected out of hand. The mere possibility that a third party may have the right to consent to a search of a person’s property does not eliminate the Fourth Amendment protection of the property owner. For example,
a wife can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in her home even though her husband can consent to a search. The police could not search her house without a warrant or consent just because her husband could have consented. Thus even if a trash collector does have sufficient authority to consent to a garbage search, it does not follow that any reasonable expectation of privacy in garbage is lost and that the police can therefore search the bags without consent.
Id. at 806. The garbage service is the agent of the homeowner for the sole purpose of taking the garbage to the dump. No one would even suggest that the police would have the right to intercept the homeowner as he or she took the garbage to the dump. Clearly the homeowner would have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the garbage until it was deposited in the dump. The same homeowner does not lose that reasonable expectation of privacy just because he or she hires a garbage service to deposit that garbage in the dump.
[¶ 68.] The plurality opinion would allow police to search any person’s garbage bags without cause and “thereby learn of their activities, associations and beliefs.” State v. Tanaka, 67 Haw. 658, 701 P.2d 1274, 1277 (1985). This is precisely the wrong that Art. VI, § 11 was created to protect against.
Permitting the police to pick and poke their way through garbage bags to peruse without cause the vestiges of a person’s most private affairs would be repugnant to [the] ideal [that the Fourth Amendment confers, “as against the government, the right to be let alone”]. A free and civilized society should comport itself with more decency.
Hempele, 576 A.2d at 815.
[¶ 69.] Requiring law enforcement to adhere to the warrant requirement of Art. VI, § 11 would impose minimal hardship on law enforcement and would maintain the privacy that South Dakotans reasonably expect. The Court owes the citizens of this State an independent analysis of the privacy interests of Art. VI, § 11 of the South Dakota Constitution. By relying solely on the flawed reasoning of Green*449wood, the plurality opinion falls short of meeting that duty. We should hold that the searches and seizures in this case were subject to the warrant requirement and that, without a warrant, neither a neighbor nor the police have a right to violate one’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
[¶ 70.] MEIERHENRY, Justice, joins this dissent.