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Trespass And Deception, Laurent Sacharoff
Trespass And Deception, Laurent Sacharoff
Laurent Sacharoff
Police routinely use deception to get into people’s homes without warrant or probable cause. They may pose as UPS delivery persons or homebuyers, or they may say they are looking for a kidnapping victim or a pedophile, when really they are looking for drugs or guns. Recent years have brought hundreds of reported decisions concerning such police ruses.
When the police lie about their identity or their purpose to enter a home, as when they pose as a homebuyer, the courts surprisingly, but routinely, approve these deceptions under the Fourth Amendment. Such intrusions, the courts reason, do not violate a …
Constitutional Trespass, Laurent Sacharoff
Constitutional Trespass, Laurent Sacharoff
Laurent Sacharoff
The Supreme Court has recently created a trespass test for Fourth Amendment searches without explaining what type of trespass it envisions—one based on the common law of 1791, on the specific trespass law of the state where the search occurred, or on some other trespass principles. Indeed Florida v. Jardines, decided in 2013, raises the question whether the Court has created a trespass test at all, a seeming turnabout that largely recapitulates the Court’s 125- year history of confusion in which it has embraced, rejected, or simply ignored trespass as a test from era to era or even year to …
The Relational Nature Of Privacy, Laurent Sacharoff
The Relational Nature Of Privacy, Laurent Sacharoff
Laurent Sacharoff
The hard Fourth Amendment cases, especially those involving surveillance, ask whether the police investigative tactic at issue counts as a “search”; if not, the Fourth Amendment does not apply at all. Under the Court’s main test, at least for surveillance without a trespass, the police conduct a “search” if they invade a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
But when the Court assesses Fourth Amendment privacy, it treats it as an all-or-nothing concept without regard to the relation between the person searched and the person searching. For example, the Court has held that when the police rummage through a person’s garbage …