Court Opinion

ID: 9796389
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:56:36.432239+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:50:11.957101
License: Public Domain

ARMSTRONG, J.,
dissenting.
The majority concludes that police officers did not conduct a search by looking through a one-inch gap in curtains that covered a motel room window and watching people inside the room handle controlled substances. Because I believe that the officers conducted a search by making the observations that they did and that the search violated Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution, I respectfully dissent.
Article I, section 9, provides that
“[n]o law shall violate the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search, or seizure; and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath, or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or thing to be seized.”
The function of the provision is to protect people against intrusion by the government into their privacy. See, e.g., State v. Campbell, 306 Or 157, 163-65, 759 P2d 1040 (1988).
Whether something is private and, hence, protected by the provision against governmental scrutiny, may depend on social and legal norms of behavior. The court put the point this way in Campbell:
*541“Government scrutiny aside, individual freedom from scrutiny is determined by social and legal norms of behavior, such as trespass laws and conventions against eavesdropping. * * * One explanation for the absence of a constitutionally protected interest against certain forms of government scrutiny may be the absence of any freedom from those forms of scrutiny in society at large. The reason that the observations of a police officer who is standing in a public place infringe no privacy interest may be that there is no generally recognized freedom from such scrutiny by private individuals. Such observations by the police would thus not significantly reduce the freedom from scrutiny available to ‘the people.’ In contrast, both laws and social conventions have long recognized the right to exclude others from certain places deemed to be private. If the government were able to enter such places without constitutional constraint, ‘the people’s’ freedom from scrutiny would be substantially impaired.”
Id. at 170-71 (citations omitted).
Although social and legal norms of behavior have a role to play in determining whether the government has engaged in conduct that intrudes into protected privacy, those norms do not control the scope of the provision. The provision may impose limits on police scrutiny that are greater than the limits that apply to private individuals under the relevant social and legal norms. See id. at 171. Conversely, however, police conduct that violates general norms of behavior is conduct that is subject to the provision, because it is conduct that subjects to scrutiny that which the relevant norms establish to be private.
We applied those principles in State v. Fortmeyer/Palmer, 178 Or App 485, 37 P3d 223 (2001). There, the police went to the defendants’ residence and asked for consent to search it for evidence of a marijuana growing operation. The defendants refused to consent to a search, so the officers got a neighbor to agree to permit the officers to enter a common side yard between the neighbor’s and the defendants’ houses. From that location, they were able to look through a basement window in the defendants’ house by getting down on their knees and looking through a crack in a cardboard covering that had been placed over the window. Through that crack, they saw marijuana growing in the basement, which *542led them to seek and obtain a warrant to search the house for evidence of marijuana production and sales.
On appeal from the defendants’ convictions for drug offenses, we held that the trial court had erred in denying the defendants’ motion to suppress the evidence obtained by the police as a result of looking through the basement window and executing the search warrant. Our holding was based on our conclusion that the police had conducted a warrantless search when they looked through the crack in the basement window. Although the officers made their observation from the common yard between the two houses, which was a place that they or anyone else who had the property owner’s permission lawfully could be, the manner in which the officers made the observation violated social norms of behavior. We explained:
“While the officers in this case had obtained a lawful vantage point, defendants still retained a privacy interest in items in the common area and within the house that were not entirely visible to someone standing there. The officers testified that, to see the room with the marijuana in it, they had to kneel down at a particular angle and turn their heads toward the crack in the otherwise obstructed basement window. To find strangers, on their knees, attempting to peer through what appears to be a covered basement window, would be suspicious, uncommon, and unacceptable in our society. * * * [Permitting the government to engage in such conduct — particularly where an individual has taken extra, albeit imperfect, measures to ensure his or her privacy — would significantly impair an individual’s interest in freedom from scrutiny. Therefore, we conclude that the officers’ conduct constituted a search of defendants’ home under Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution.”
Id. at 491-92.
I believe that the same principle applies to the officers’ conduct in this case. The officers made the observations that they did from a place that they or anyone else lawfully could be: the public walkway that extended along the front of the rooms on the second floor of the motel. However, the manner in which they observed the conduct of the people inside *543the room violated social norms of behavior that protect people against scrutiny of their private conduct.
The officers made their observations through a gap in the closed curtains of the motel room. Nothing in the record suggests that the curtains were not closed as fully as they could be closed, which means that the officers could not look through the curtains into the room while standing in front of the window. However, they could and did look through the curtains by standing close to the edge of the window and looking at an angle through a gap in the curtains where one curtain slid in front of the other. In doing that, they behaved in a way that would be suspicious, uncommon, and unacceptable for anyone else to behave in seeking to scrutinize the private conduct of people inside the room.
I reach the conclusion that I do because I believe that it is understood to be socially inappropriate for someone to look through the closed curtains of a motel room in the manner in which the officers did to satisfy the person’s interest or curiosity about the conduct of the people inside the room. For example, if someone (or the officers, for that matter) heard sounds emanating from the room that suggested that people were making love in it, the person would violate ORS 163.700(1)(b) by looking into the room in the manner that the officers did if the person did so to arouse or gratify the person’s sexual desire.
ORS 163.700(1)(b) makes it a crime to observe a person in a state of nudity without that person’s consent if the observation is made to arouse or satisfy the sexual desire of the observer and the nude person who is observed “is in a place and circumstances where the person has a reasonable expectation of personal privacy.” ORS 163.700(1)(b). The statute defines the above-quoted phrase to include places such as the motel room in this case if the place “is not open to public view.” ORS 163.700(2)(c). It goes on to define an area that is open to public view as an area that “can be readily seen” and in which a “person within the area can be distinguished by normal unaided vision when viewed from a public place as defined in ORS 161.015.” ORS 163.700(2)(d). Under those provisions, the walkway in front of the motel room was a public place under ORS 161.015 and it was possible to *544observe people inside the room using normal, unaided vision. Nevertheless, I believe that the effort required to look through the curtains to see the people in the room means that the room was not an area that could be readily seen. Consequently, the statute would cover the conduct that I have described in my hypothetical example.
Although the statute would not apply to equivalent efforts to observe people inside the motel room for purposes other than arousing or gratifying the sexual desire of the observer, I believe that the distinction that the statute makes between areas that can and cannot be readily seen is a distinction that is well established in our society. That distinction bears, in turn, on whether a person has engaged in behavior that violates social norms in order to observe that which is understood to be private. Because the officers violated social norms of behavior in order to see what was behind the closed curtains of the motel room, I believe that they conducted a search that was subject to Article I, section 9.
In summary, the police violated social norms of behavior by making the observations that they did through the closed curtains of the motel room, thereby intruding into the privacy of the people inside the room. In doing so, they conducted a warrantless search of the room that violated Article I, section 9. Consequently, the trial court erred in denying defendant’s motion to suppress the evidence obtained as a result of the search. I respectfully dissent from the majority’s contrary conclusion.