America has had its Constitution for more than two centuries, and yet today there are many questions about its meaning that still do not have final answers. A perfect example: What does the word “unreasonable” mean? The Supreme Court agreed this week to try again to give an answer – but there is not the slightest chance that this will end the inquiry.
“Unreasonable” is typical of many words in the nation’s founding document that give voice to an aspiration – in this instance, the desire for privacy against an intrusive government -- but leave plenty of room for an evolving nation to decide for itself what it means.
Those who wrote the Constitution in 1787 could not have known that, 99 years later, someone (a German inventor) would create an automobile powered by a gasoline engine. Nor could the Founders have anticipated that, one day, the Supreme Court would have to decide just what would be “unreasonable” when the government took action that involved people and their cars. And, when that happened, a constitutional story began to unfold, and it is still unfolding today. It has been, and is, about the Fourth Amendment, privacy, and motor vehicles. And, on Thursday, the Justices agreed to create another chapter, agreeing to rule in their new term on a case named Collins v. Virginia.
The Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights added in 1791, protects American’s privacy “in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” An automobile, everyone agrees, is an “effect,” like other private property. But when does a search by police of a car go from reasonable to unreasonable, and thus violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy?
One of the simplest ways to define what the Fourth Amendment protects is to recall that, before a police search can be legal, the officers must have a search warrant authorizing an intrusion into a private realm. But because such a search violates the Fourth Amendment only if it was “unreasonable,” it is possible that a warrant would not be required for some searches.
In other words, the Supreme Court in interpreting the scope of that Amendment has been able to create exceptions to the warrant requirement. There is now, and has been since 1925, an “automobile exception” to the search warrant mandate.
Over time, that exception has been extended by the Supreme Court or by lower courts to motor homes, trucks, trailers pulled by trucks, boats, houseboats – and even airplanes. What do those “effects” have in common? They can easily be moved from place to place, and the “automobile exception” has its origin in that common characteristic. Some courts have gone so far as to rule that, because a vehicle is mobile, police do not need a warrant to search containers located inside it.
Where did all of that start? Turn back to the era of Prohibition in America, when trafficking in liquor was unconstitutional under the Eighteenth Amendment. But Americans’ thirst was insatiable, so there was a thriving business in selling booze, and in transporting it from place to place.
The Eighteenth Amendment barred such transportation, and a law passed by Congress in 1921 to implement the amendment allowed federal agents to search moving vehicles if they had reason to believe that they were being used to move illegal liquor from place to place.
Not long after that law was passed, federal agents stopped an Oldsmobile Roadster on a Michigan highway leading from Detroit to Grand Rapids. The officers regularly patrolled that highway, believing it to be the route that bootleggers regularly traveled. They stopped the Roadster, acting on information that the car and its occupants were, in fact, carrying liquor. The search at roadside turned up, hidden in the upholstery, 68 bottles of whiskey and gin. Two men, George Carroll and John Kiro were convicted of transportation the booze illegally.
They lost their appeal to the Supreme Court. In its decision in March 1925 in Carroll v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the officers did not need a warrant to search the Oldsmobile, concluding that it is “not practical to secure a warrant, because the vehicle can be quickly moved out of the locality or jurisdiction in which the warrant must be sought.” In such a situation, according to what would become known as “the Carroll doctrine” or the “automobile exception,” officers need only have “probable cause” to believe that a suspected vehicle was carrying contraband.
Over time, the Justices and lower courts would expand the “automobile exception” so greatly that some Fourth Amendment scholars would complain that little was left of the warrant requirement, and even of the probable cause requirement, under that amendment. One scholar referred to those requirements as having become “an historic relic.”
The expansion of the doctrine has continued, and now the latest broadening of it has reached the Supreme Court in the case of Ryan Austin Collins of Charlottesville, VA. His case, to which a state court applied the “automobile exception,” does not even involve a car, but rather a motorcycle.
Collins was convicted of receiving stolen property – an orange and black Suzuki motorcycle – and sentenced to three years in prison (with most of the sentence suspended).
In state court, Collins had tried to block the use of the evidence about the motorcycle, claiming that police officers did not have a warrant when they came onto the driveway of a private home, and pulled back a tarp partially covering the motorcycle they had been searching for under suspicion about Collins.
Contributing to the modern character of this incident under the Fourth Amendment, the police were led to the house where Collins was living, and to the motorcycle, by photographs of the Suzuki on his Facebook page.
When Collins’ lawyers raised the Fourth Amendment in his defense, based on the entry onto private property without a warrant, the state’s lawyers countered by relying upon the “automobile exception” and the probable cause reasoning of the Carroll decision. While Collins’ lawyers argued that the exception only applied to automobiles, not motorcycles, his lawyers also relied upon a separate Fourth Amendment doctrine often followed by the Supreme Court – that a warrant is required before police may enter a home or the yard or driveway close to the home.
Eventually, Collins would lose his case in the Virginia Supreme Court. That court found that the case was “more appropriately resolved under the automobile exception” than under the home privacy rationale. The exception, the opinion said, provides “a simple, bright-line test” – the mobility of the vehicle involved. That test, it said, applies to motorcycles, too, even if they are parked on private property.
Collins’ lawyers took the case on to the Supreme Court, raising a single question: “Whether the Fourth Amendment’s automobile exception permits a police officer, uninvited and without a warrant, to enter private property, approach a home, and search a vehicle parked a few feet from the house.”
Worded in that way, Collins’ appeal appears to be relying more heavily upon the home privacy rationale than upon the question of whether motorcycles get any more Fourth Amendment protection than cars do. That might improve his chances for upsetting his conviction, but might not add greatly to understanding what the “automobile exception” means today. In other words, the inquiry about what the Fourth Amendment has come to mean will go on.
Legendary journalist Lyle Denniston has written for us as a contributor since June 2011 and has covered the Supreme Court since 1958. His work also appears on lyldenlawnews.com.
