SCOTUS Hears Oral Arguments on Warrantless “Community Caretaking” Case

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Caniglia v. Strom, a case asking whether the police can enter a person’s home without a warrant when they are acting in a non-investigative, “community-caretaking” capacity. The limited community-caretaking exception previously has allowed the police to search impounded vehicles, but the Supreme Court has never before extended it to the home. PPSA filed a brief in this case earlier this year examining the common-law history of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and explaining that, at common law, a community-caretaking exception broad enough to allow warrantless entry into the home would have been unthinkable.
 
Based on the oral argument, Americans concerned with protecting the home from warrantless government intrusion have reason to be partially optimistic. Although there was plainly some disagreement between the Justices, multiple Justices expressed concern with categorically extending the community-caretaking exception to the warrant requirement for searches of and seizures from the home:
 

• Justice Gorsuch, citing the Court’s long standing practice of “looking to common law” when interpreting the Fourth Amendment, said that he was “unable to locate any common law authority privileging a trespass absent … exigent circumstances.”

• Justice Alito, while seemingly sympathetic to the need to make quick decisions about potential risks to life and health that were not entirely certain in the moment, nonetheless highlighted that to a “lot of people”—presumably a few of the other Justices—the community caretaking exception was troubling because it “doesn’t seem to have any clear boundaries.”

• Justice Sotomayor staked out the strongest concern over privacy by emphasizing her discomfort with categorically extending the exception to the home without some “limiting principles” to prevent the government from abusing the exception, particularly when any immediate risk to life or limb had been addressed, as it had in Caniglia’s case.

• Justice Breyer also recognized how harmful a categorical expansion of the community-caretaking exception to the home would be, explaining that without at least some lines drawn, it would be impossible to “foresee how broad” the exception would be. Without providing some guidance, then, an expanded doctrine would almost certainly be a recipe for abuse. He seemed to favor a fairly narrow version of an emergency rule such as that subsequently adopted by the Rhode Island legislature.

• Justice Kagan expressed her view that “if there’s any one principle of the Fourth Amendment,” it is that “the home is special and that the automobile,” the traditional place where community-caretaking searches occur, “is distinctly not.”

• Justice Thomas examined the Court’s precedents and explained that the Court usually holds “that the Fourth Amendment standard, when it comes to the home,” requires a warrant. Quoting Chief Justice Rehnquist, he distinguished the home from automobiles: “One class of cases which constitutes at least a partial exception to this general rule is automobile searches.”

Several Justices, most vigorously the Chief Justice and Justices Alito and Kavanaugh, however, seemed highly concerned with various potential, but uncertain, emergencies that might not satisfy a strict “exigent circumstances” rule, but nonetheless seemed like reasonable warrantless searches to them.  The examples pressed involved the elderly who may have fallen or otherwise injured themselves as well as potential suicide risks. Where you cannot be sure an emergency exists, but there is a fear that it might.

Given the Justices’ voiced concerns over limiting the doctrine, it seems likely that, even if the Court were to expand the community-caretaking exception to the home in some cases involving risks to the elderly, children, or potentially suicidal individuals, it would may provide some limiting guidance to stop the exception to the warrant requirement from overrunning the rule when it comes to the home.

As PPSA explained in our brief in this case, however, even a narrow expansion of the exception to the home would pose grave concerns for privacy and deviate from the common law. Most notably, anything the police see in a person’s home while lawfully acting as caretakers could be used in criminal proceedings against them under what is known as the plain-view doctrine.  And the concerns over health and safety of persons in the home can more than adequately be addressed through the historically grounded exigent circumstances doctrine or simply by getting a warrant in cases of genuine concern. We hope the Court here continues its longstanding practice of looking to the common law by requiring the government to obtain a warrant before entering a home in all but the most extreme cases. Only by declining to extend the exception to the home will the Court be able to preserve the home’s centuries-old protections. PPSA will report on the Court’s opinion, expected by June.