WASHINGTON - In a pair of 6-3 decisions, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the police can sometimes search a home over the objections of one of its residents and that criminal defendants are not entitled to hearings to try to gain access to frozen assets to pay their lawyers.
The case about searches followed a confrontation at the Los Angeles home of Walter Fernandez, who was suspected of a role in a robbery.
“You don’t have any right to come in here,” he told police officers. “I know my rights.”
Under a 2006 decision, Georgia v. Randolph, that objection was enough to bar a search of his home without a warrant even if another occupant consented, at least as long as Fernandez remained present.
The police arrested Fernandez on suspicion that he had beaten his domestic partner, Roxanne Rojas, who also was there. An hour later, with Fernandez at a police station,the police returned and Rojas let them in. They found weapons and evidence linking Fernandez to the robbery.
He was convicted on robbery, gun and domestic-abuse charges after the trial judge refused to suppress the evidence collected at his home. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
The question for the justices was whether the police should have obtained a warrant in light of Fernandez’s objection. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said no.
The general rule, he said, was that any occupant’s consent was sufficient.
“The lawful occupant of a house or apartment should have the right to invite the police to enter the dwelling and conduct a search,” Alito wrote. “Any other rule would trample on the rights of the occupant who is willing to consent. Such an occupant may want the police to search in order to dispel suspicion raised by sharing quarters with a criminal.”
The 2006 decision, he added, was limited to objections from people who were physically present. Expanding that exception after the objecting occupants were gone, even at the hands of the police themselves, he wrote, “would raise a plethora of problems.”
Among them, Alito wrote, was how long the objection had to be respected.
“A week?” he asked. “A month? A year? Ten years?”
Alito further noted evidence that Fernandez had battered Rojas before police arrived at their apartment.
“Having beaten Rojas, [Fernandez] would bar her from controlling access to her own home until such time as he chose to relent,” Alito wrote. “The Fourth Amendment does not give him that power.”
The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and provides that a warrant may not be issued without probable cause, but its text doesn’t specify when a search warrant must be obtained. No warrant is needed if consent is granted.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer joined the majority opinion. Kennedy and Breyer had been in the majority in the 2006 decision.
‘PETITE SIZE’
In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wrote that “the police could readily have obtained a warrant to search the shared residence.”
“Instead of adhering to the warrant requirement, today’s decision tells the police they may dodge it, never mind ample time to secure the approval of a neutral magistrate,” Ginsburg wrote. “Suppressing the warrant requirement, the court shrinks to petite size our holding in Georgia v. Randolph.”
Ginsburg also raised a host of puzzling scenarios that could face police and, eventually, courts, including questions of how long someone must be absent before his or her refusal loses force.
“Are the police free to enter the instant the objector leaves the door to retire for a nap, answer the phone, use the bathroom or speak to another officer outside?” Ginsburg questioned.
The second case arose from the prosecution of Kerri and Brian Kaley, a New York couple, who were accused of participating in a scheme to obtain and sell prescription medical devices. They were unable to hire a lawyer to defend themselves because the government had frozen their assets.
A pair of 1989 Supreme Court decisions ruled that freezing assets before a criminal trial was permissible, even if it frustrated the defendant’s ability to hire a lawyer, so long as there was probable cause that a crime had been committed and the assets were linked to the offenses described in the indictment.
The Kaleys did not challenge those decisions, but they did seek a hearing at which they could try to show that they were entitled to use the frozen money to defend themselves because the charges against them were flawed.
Kagan, writing for the majority, rejected that request.
“The only question is whether the Kaleys are constitutionally entitled to a judicial re-determination of the conclusion the grand jury already reached: that probable cause supports this criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “And that question, we think, has a ready answer, because a fundamental and historic commitment of our criminal justice system is to entrust those probable cause findings to grand juries.”
Any other ruling, she said, “could not but undermine the criminal justice system’s integrity.”
She acknowledged that the right to choose a lawyer “matters profoundly.”
“Congress of course may strike its own balance and give defendants like the Kaleys the kind of hearing they want,” Kagan wrote.
But the Constitution, she said, does not require them.
Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg and Alito joined Kagan’s majority opinion.
In dissent, Roberts said the right to a lawyer of one’s choice was crucial.
“An individual facing serious criminal charges brought by the United States has little but the Constitution and his attorney standing between him and prison,” the chief justice wrote. “He might readily give all he owns to defend himself.”
Roberts said the evidence against the Kaleys was weak and that it was hard to identify any victims they might have defrauded. He noted that a co-defendant, whose assets were not frozen and who was represented by her chosen lawyer, was acquitted “on all charges in less than three hours - a good omen for the Kaleys.’”
The majority, he said, had relied on “syllogistic-type reasoning” at the expense of common sense and sensitivity to the central role of defense lawyers in criminal cases.
“Few things could do more to ‘undermine the criminal justice system’s integrity,’” he wrote, quoting from Kagan’s opinion, “than to allow the government to initiate a prosecution and then, at its option, disarm its presumptively innocent opponent by depriving him of his counsel of choice - without even an opportunity to be heard. That is the result of the court’s decision in this case, and it is fundamentally at odds with our constitutional tradition and basic notions of fair play.” Information for this article was contributed by Adam Liptak of The New York Times and by Michael Doyle of McClatchy Newspapers.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/26/2014