Georgia v. Randolph

By Matthew Meiners

Chief Justice (C.J) John Roberts has issued his first dissent.

In my opinion, the dissent of a Supreme Court Justice tells us more than an opinion would about the theories that guide that justice’s judgments. In this case, the C.J.’s dissent allows us a glimpse into his mind, and what this observer finds lying there is not what one would hope to find in the mind of a supreme defender of the Constitution.

The case concerned a situation where one person living in a house invited a police search, and another person, living in the same house, who was present at the time, denied the police access. In this case, the police entered the house in question anyway, and found evidence that was later used against the person who had originally denied their search request. That person sued, and now has won, to protect his right, under the 4th Amendment, against unreasonable searches. The majority has held that, if there is someone present who objects to a warrant-less police search of their home or dwelling, at the time that search was requested, the police must desist and get a warrant.

The C.J.’s major line of reasoning in his dissent centers around a concern for victims of domestic violence, saying that the new rule, as imposed by the judgment in this case, does not allow the police to enter a home without a warrant even if, in their perception, a danger exists for one of the occupants of that home. An example cited by Roberts is a situation in which a husband and wife are at the door together when the police arrive to request a search of their home. The husband, who has been beating his wife, denies the request, which would certainly turn up evidence of his wrongdoing, but the woman, who would benefit from such a search, being captive of her fear, invites the police in, but will not tell them why. Not only does the majority insist that police have the right to enter anyway, if they perceive the wife’s fear in this case, they even go so far as to call the C.J.’s concern a “red herring.” The majority’s opinion states that police may enter a home under such circumstances, and even if the police have only a hunch as to an exigent circumstace, the majority observes, they can secure the premises to avoid evidence destruction while they obtain a warrant, as is normal procedure.

Roberts real objection, in my mind, is that the law, as it stands after this decision, is not kept SIMPLE. The desire for simplicity here seems to be in order to achieve another of the C.J.'s stated desires - the making of police work easier for the police. I would first respectfully disagree that the rule is really that complex, and would point out that the rule, in sum, is that the government cannot search a house without the consent of those inhabitants present at the time of the search request, and that normal exceptions for exigent circumstances (as in the example above) apply to this new rule. Seems simple to me.

So for the sake of the argument, however, let’s assume that the rule is very complex and that the majority's decision upends current 4th Amendment jurisprudence, as the CJ seems to think, and as he implies in this dissent. My reply under those assumptions is this: It is not the job of the court, nor the intent of the Constitution, to make easier the jobs of officers of the government when those officers wish, for whatever reason, to peer into the private lives of it's citizens. If the originators of our system of government wished for a state in which the peering into the private lives of citizens was an easy affair when the government came a-knocking, they would not have wanted, nor would they have passed, the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

Because of the FACT that the 4th Amendment exists, and because of the FACT that it was so earnestly desired by the creators of our nation, that it was bundled among the Bill of Rights that many states demanded as a condition of their accession to the Union, we should be reasonably sure of the assumption that the founders did NOT want such a state.

We must accept the truth that because the founders saddled the government with the burdens of investigation, indictment, trial, proof, and punishment of a crime, as well as the arrests and detainment of the criminals, and because no burden but that of defence was laid on defendants, ours must therefore be a country where being a cop is SUPPOSED to be hard, and where the search by the government of a citizens home is supposed to be both very, very hard and very rare indeed.

In the end, the C.j.’s dissent offers some good points, but regretfully does not recognize that they have been addressed by the majority’s opinion. In the process, however, he does achieve a perhaps unintended consequence of - letting the citizens he serves know him a little better, for better or worse.