US Supreme Court Denies Police Greater Authority To Perform Warrantless Searches Of Homes

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th May, 2021) The US Supreme Court delivered a unanimous decision in the Caniglia v. Strom Et Al. case on Monday, finding that houses maintain special privacy protections from warrantless searches, even under some exigent circumstances.

"What is reasonable for vehicles is different from what is reasonable for homes. Cady acknowledged as much, and this Court has repeatedly 'declined to expand the scope of... exceptions to the warrant requirement to permit warrantless entry into the home,'" Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his opinion.

Courts have generally upheld a "community caretaking exception" that allows police to sidestep the constitutional requirement of obtaining a warrant prior to searching private property in order to render emergency assistance to an injured occupant or to protect an occupant from imminent injury, but have declined to extend this concept more broadly to homes.

The case in question involved a situation between Edward Caniglia and his wife Kim Caniglia. During an argument, Edward placed a gun on the table and asked his wife to shoot him. Kim hid the gun following the argument and spent the night at a hotel.

After not hearing from her husband, she grew worried that he may have harmed himself and called the police to perform a wellness check. The police then showed up, forced him to undergo a psychological evaluation and then performed a warrantless search of his home in order to seize his guns.

The ruling overturns a lower court decision which involved arguments revolving around whether the logic of the exception recognized in the 1973 case Cady v. Dombrowski, which allowed police to conduct warrantless searches of cars in their possession after a crash, could also be applied to private residences.