Supreme Court Says The Community Caretaking Exception Doesn't Apply To Warrantless Searches Of People's Homes

from the rolling-back-a-blown-call dept

The Supreme Court has been on a bit of roll lately. After years of making things worse for plaintiffs suing law enforcement officers over rights violations, the Supreme Court has begun reversing qualified immunity decisions finding in favor of the rights violators. It still has a lot of damage to undo from its decades of expansion of the qualified immunity doctrine but it's a start.

A new, very short decision [PDF] from the Supreme Court reverses another blown call by an appellate court and restores some Fourth Amendment protections that decision stripped away.

In March of last year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals decided to do something a little different: it extended the limits of the poorly defined "community caretaker" function to cover warrantless searches and seizures that involved someone's home. The decision it relied on -- Cady v. Dombrowski (1973) -- previously only covered vehicles already in law enforcement possession or on public roads.

In that case, a man's wife called for a welfare check on her husband. The previous night, her husband had asked her to "shoot him now and get it over with." She left and he stayed in the house with the gun. When she couldn't reach him by phone the next day, she asked the police to check in with him.

The police spoke to the man and expressed his wife's concerns. They then went to his house. He voluntarily departed via an ambulance to check in at the local hospital to see what help they could be in dealing with the mental breakdown he seemed to be experiencing. The officers took it upon themselves to enter the home and seize any guns they found. They did this despite the man (now hospitalized and posing no threat to anyone) expressly refusing to consent to this seizure.

Too bad, said the First Circuit. The home is now a car and "community caretaking" function excuses the lack of warrant or express permission to take personal property.

We hold today — as a matter of first impression in this circuit — that this measure of protection extends to police officers performing community caretaking functions on private premises (including homes). Based on this holding and on our other conclusions, we affirm the district court's entry of summary judgment for the defendants in this highly charged case.

Wrong, says the Supreme Court, in a four-page opinion written by Clarence Thomas (and joined by three concurrences). The First Circuit had no business extending the reach of the Cady decision into someone's home -- especially when it was clear there was no community caretaking to be done.

The First Circuit’s “community caretaking” rule... goes beyond anything this Court has recognized. The decision below assumed that respondents lacked a warrant or consent, and it expressly disclaimed the possibility that they were reacting to a crime. The court also declined to consider whether any recognized exigent circumstances were present because respondents had forfeited the point.

Nor did it find that respondents’ actions were akin to what a private citizen might have had authority to do if petitioner’s wife had approached a neighbor for assistance instead of the police.

This case isn't Cady but for houses. There were some crucial differences, the most important being who was in control of the property that was searched.

True, Cady also involved a warrantless search for a firearm. But the location of that search was an impounded vehicle—not a home—“‘a constitutional difference’” that the opinion repeatedly stressed.

And that decision even went so far as to inform law enforcement that they weren't exactly welcome to warrantless searches of cars either, even with the community caretaking function in play.

In fact, Cady expressly contrasted its treatment of a vehicle already under police control with a search of a car “parked adjacent to the dwelling place of the owner.”

How the First Circuit saw this and still decided the Supreme Court actually meant to allow cops to search homes and seize property without a warrant is something only the First can explain. It didn't do much explaining in its opinion. Perhaps it will do a bit more when it handles this case for the second time.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, community caretaker, supreme court, warrantless searches