Last week, the Supreme Court granted cert in a Fourth Amendment case, Lange v. California, that asks whether a police officer in "hot pursuit" of a suspected misdemeanant must get a warrant before entering the suspect's home. That question turns out to be momentous for several reasons, two of which are obvious and one of which is less so but may be even more profound.
First, the vast majority of arrests in this country are for misdemeanors. Citing our friend Alexandra Natapoff, Lange's cert petition notes that "[r]oughly thirteen million misdemeanor cases are filed each year, outnumbering felonies by four to one." Indeed, as Prof. Natapoff documents in her wonderful book, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal and in this interview, "[t]he misdemeanor system represents 80 percent of the state criminal dockets in this country." Thus, contrary to Justice Souter's misperception in one of the Supeme Court's most important misdemeanor cases, Atwater v. City of Lago, we certainly are "confronting . . . an epidemic of unnecessary minor-offense arrests." Moreover, as Prof. Natapoff and others have documented, arrests for even minor offenses can have devestating effects on people's lives. Among other things, misdemeanors "are moneymakers for local jurisdictions," and the fines, court fees, and other monetary penalties they impose can result in crushing debt and a cascading financial crisis from which it becomes impossible for many people to escape. Besides the direct financial implications, a misdemeanor conviction can have serious collateral consequences, including loss of employement, housing, and eligibility for various government benefits. In short, contrary to what you—or, perhaps more to the point, many judges—might think, a misdemeanor arrest is a really big deal.
Second, allowing police officers to storm into people's houses unexpectedly is a terrible idea, as at least some judges have understood for several hundred years. As recounted in an amicus brief filed by the National Assocation of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), a 1757 case from England involved “a murder conviction of a man who reacted to a peace officer’s entry into his friend’s workshop by striking the officer dead with an ax." As the judge in that case recognized, occupants must be told whether an officer barging into a home or office "cometh as not as a mere trespasser, but claiming to act under proper authority." Fast forward two centuries to a case where an American plainclothes detective pried open the window of a rooming house to investigate a suspicious noise, startling the landlady, and we see Justice Robert Jackson presciently warning that “[m]any home-owners in this crime-beset city doubtless are armed. When a woman sees a strange man, in plain clothes, prying up her bedroom window and climbing in, her natural impulse would be to shoot [him].” If anything, this concern has only grown more acute as police have become more militarized and more people have chosen to exercise their constitutional right to own a gun at home for self defense. Underscoring that point, the NACDL's amicus brief describes a number of hairraising incidents where police barged into a home without a warrant in "hot pursuit" of supsected misdemeanants—including a young man who relieved himself on a corner of his girlfriend's outdoor patio—with sometimes tragic results. In short, there have always been compelling reasons to be extraordinarily careful about allowing armed agents of the state to come storming into people's homes unannounced, even if they conflict with the government's strong preference for volume and efficiency in the administration of criminal justice.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/get-warrant
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