Emergency Entry and the Fourth Amendment

Here is a bit deeper dive on Case v. Montana, the U.S. Supreme Court emergency entry case that I noted briefly this morning. Although the high court affirmed the judgment of the Montana Supreme Court, it did so with a more limiting standard than the state court used. Three standards have been used by various courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court chose the middle one. The standard is unique to emergency cases, rejecting both looser and more restrictive standards derived from criminal investigation cases.

The emergency in this case was created when Case’s former girlfriend reported that Case had said during a phone call that he intended to kill himself. This was followed by a click that may have been a gun being cocked, a pop that may have been a discharge, and then dead air. This information, combined with Case’s history, make it hard to see how the state could have lost this case under any standard. The strong possibility that he had already shot himself but might be still alive and in need of emergency aid to save his life seems compelling.

The Montana Supreme Court thought that the “community caretaking” function of the police permits entry of a home in emergency situations “when ‘objective, specific and articulable facts’ would lead an ‘experienced officer [to] suspect’ that a person inside ‘is in need of help or is in peril.’ ” That is the minimal standard needed for the police to briefly detain someone on the street, known as a “Terry stop” for the 1968 case of Terry v. Ohio. The defendant wanted the much more restrictive standard needed for search warrants: probable cause. He cited cases from the D.C., Second, and Eleventh Circuits supporting that view.

In the 2006 case of Brigham City v. Stuart, the Supreme Court set out a rule for entry to a home in an emergency: “Police may enter a home without a warrant when they have an objectively reasonable basis for believing that an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury.” Is the Brigham City standard equivalent to either the Terry standard or the probable cause standard?

No. The Montana Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit are both wrong. Justice Kagan wrote the opinion of the Court, which was unanimous.

The Terry standard fails to account for the special status of the home. There is a huge difference between a police officer stopping someone on the street to ask a few questions (like, “What are you doing sneaking around warehouses in the middle of the night?”) and a squad of police breaking down a door to enter a home. “At the ‘very core’ of [the Fourth Amendment] guarantee, as this Court has often stated, ‘stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.’ ”

But Case and the decisions he relies on carry that special status too far when they claim it requires compliance with a standard developed for an entirely different purpose.

[The probable cause] standard has acquired meaning over time by virtue of [the criminal investigatory] context, as judges have assessed, in case after case, the requisite likelihood of finding criminal contraband or evidence…. The resulting body of law would fit awkwardly, if at all, in the non-criminal, non-investigatory setting at issue here. So Brigham City adopted a different approach. Rather than strain to relate probable-cause decisions to emergency-aid situations, we asked simply whether an officer had “an objectively reasonable basis for believing” that his entry was direly needed to prevent or deal with serious harm.

Applying the Brigham City standard to the facts “yields a ready conclusion.” Of course the police had the required “objectively reasonable basis.”

Justice Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion noting the case-specific complexities of these matters and the regrettably large number of cases when the entering police end up harming the very person they entered to help.

Justice Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion citing authorities as far back as King Henry VI, deep in the Middle Ages, harmonizing the current decision with common law doctrines.