Court Opinion

ID: 9486605
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:54:00.618587+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:49.531817
License: Public Domain

NATHANIEL R. JONES, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Three investigators arrived unannounced at Phillip Branson’s auto lot and examined car parts in an open field. Finished, they entered a work building, went up into an attic, opened a door to an adjoining room, and found some marijuana. In the majority’s view, such a warrantless search was authorized by Tennessee Code § 55-5-108(a)(3) and permitted by the “administrative inspection” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. In my view, neither is the case. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.1
I
Section 55-5-108(a)(3) authorizes investigators to “inspect any vehicle, whether intact, wrecked, or dismantled, at an automobile dismantler’s lot, salvage lot or other similar establishment required to keep records under subdivision (a)(1), within the state of Tennessee.” By its terms, the provision authorizes the inspection or examination of auto parts, but it says nothing to limit the physical scope of a search of a shop’s premises in inspecting those parts.
Despite the statute’s silence in this regard, the majority appears to hold that Tennessee investigators have carte blanche to enter and search any building or room where parts are located. Under the majority’s reading, the statute renders irrelevant a shop owner’s consent to a search of a private room or the owner’s ability to bring the parts in it to the investigators. The majority believes that the statute permits entry and search of that room, at least when the shop owner acknowledges that there are some parts there. The opinion stops short of addressing whether the statute authorizes investigators to search a room that they believe contains parts, but which the shop owner says does not contain any.
My reading of the statute differs. Given the established presumption against warrantless searches, we should not construe a statute to authorize any more of a search than the minimum that its language requires. This Tennessee statute thus does not, as the district court put it, allow officers “to roam at will over the defendant’s premises and to engage in a search of areas that were not clearly open to the public.” J.A. at 42. Rather, it allows them to “inspect” vehicles and their parts. This of course means that investigators can examine auto parts in plain view, or in areas of the shop that are open to the public, such as the field where these investigators began their inspection. However, in the event that a shop owner has parts in a private room, such as the few parts that Branson had in temporary storage in his attic, the owner must at the least be allowed to present the parts for inspection while *119maintaining the privacy of his room.2 As it appears that it is not unusual for auto shop owners to have their home and business at the same location, it is all the more important in the interest of personal privacy that we not construe the statute any more broadly than the Tennessee legislature has drafted it. Yet, that is what the majority does here. It construes the statute to authorize physical searches much more extensive than necessary to “inspect” parts.
I therefore conclude that the investigators exceeded their statutory authority to the extent that they searched private areas of Branson’s business premises.3
II
If I were to assume that the majority has read the statute correctly, its reading would' compel me to conclude that the statute is unconstitutional. The majority believes the statute authorizes investigators to enter and search any room containing parts in an auto shop. So glossed, the statute does not fit under the “administrative inspection” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. That deviation from the general requirement that warrantless searches are ;per se violations of the Constitution was most recently explicated in New York v. Burger, 482 U.S. 691, 107 S.Ct. 2686, 96 L.Ed.2d 601 (1987).
Burger recognized that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures is applicable to commercial premises as well as private homes, for a business operator has a reasonable expectation of privacy on his premises. Id. at 699, 107 S.Ct. at 2642. However, that expectation, the Court said, is attenuated for owners of pervasively regulated industries that have a long tradition.of close government supervision. Id. at 700, 107 S.Ct. at 2642. Where the expectation of privacy is weakened and the government interest in regulation is heightened, certain warrantless inspections can be reasonable, if a statute authorizes those inspections and meets the following three requirements:
First, there must be a substantial government interest that informs the regulatory scheme pursuant to which the inspection is made.
♦ * * * sfe *
Second, the warrantless inspections must be necessary to further the regulatory scheme.
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Finally, the statute’s inspection program, in terms of the certainty and regularity of its application, must provide a constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant. In other words, the regulatory statute must perform the two basic functions of a warrant: it must advise the owner of the commercial premises that the search is being made pursuant to the law.and has a properly defined scope, and it must limit the discretion of the inspecting officers.
Id. at 702-03, 107 S.Ct. at 2644 (citations and quotations omitted).
Only the third requirement is at issue here. In my view, if this statute is read to authorize general searches of auto shop premises, it has not provided for a constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant. Namely, the statute does not limit the officers’ discretion by providing any standard for determining which portions of the premises they may search, nor does it provide notice that such wide-ranging searches will occur.
*120Though Burger upheld a similar New York auto shop inspection statute, the Court did not consider a search as wide-ranging as the one at issue here. In Burger, investigators arrived at the defendant’s auto shop and asked to see his required license and business records, which he could not produce. They then inspected vehicles in his junkyard and determined from the identification numbers that some were stolen. Id. at 694-95, 107 S.Ct. at 2639-40. A dividéd Court held that the statute permitted such an inspection, but the physical scope of the search was not at issue in the ease. There is no indication that the Court would have found that the statute was a proper substitute for a warrant had the search invaded private rooms on the premises. Like the Tennessee statute here, the New York statute gave no indication that officers could go anywhere on the premises where parts were kept. See id. at 694 n. 1, 107 S.Ct. at 2639 n. 1. Due to Burgees requirement that a regulatory search statute provide a constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant, I think that such a search would have been found unconstitutional in that case and thus must be found unconstitutional here.
III
Finally, I must observe that even if I were to accept both the majority’s expansive reading of the statute and the constitutionality of that reading, I still could not find that the officers’ search of the final closed room in Branson’s attic was permissible. The officers opened the door to that room without even asking whether auto parts were inside, and in fact the record fails to indicate that any parts were there. That room, however, is where the searching officers found some marijuana. In my view, today’s opinion disregards this important fact, even as it holds that the- statute and the Constitution permitted the officers to enter the attic in' the first place.
For the above reasons, I would grant Branson’s motion to suppress the evidence.

. My conclusion accords with both the Eastern District of Tennessee, which suppressed the evidence in this case, and the Middle District of Tennessee, which has held § 55-5-108 unconstitutional. See United States v. Proffitt, No. 2:93-00014 (M.D.Tenn. Jan. 10, 1994).

. In the same vein, the fact that § 55—5—108(a)(1) requires shop owners to make "available” all the required records of their transactions does not authorize a search of any room or area where those records are kept.

. Such a search would of course be permissible, regardless of the statute, if Branson voluntarily consented to it. In the proceeding below, the parties disputed whether Branson consented to allow the investigators to ascend to his attic. However, Officer Wright testified that he would have inspected the attic regardless of whether Branson gave his consent, .and as the district court found, the investigators "asserted their lawful authority to conduct the inspection from the moment that they arrived on the defendant’s premises. Nothing the defendant could have done, short of violent resistance, could have prevented the officers from entering the attic area.” J.A. at 46. Even if Branson did not resist the officers, voluntary consent cannot be demonstrated by “showing no more than acquiescence to a claim of lawful authority,” Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U.S. 543, 548-49, 88 S.Ct. 1788, 1792, 20 L.Ed.2d 797 (1968).