Supreme Court Backs Searches in Some Cases

[BioCatholic]

**WASHINGTON (March 22) - The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police without a warrant cannot search a home when one resident says to come in but another tells them to go away, and the court’s new leader complained that the ruling could hamper investigations of domestic abuse.

Justices, in a 5-3 decision, said that police did not have the authority to enter and search the home of a small town Georgia lawyer even though the man’s wife invited them in.**

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Stevens said that “assuming that both spouses are competent, neither one is a master possessing the power to override the other’s constitutional right to deny entry to their castle.”

Amen to that. if the Conservatives are so “pro family”, and value “spousal priviledge” so much, why did they try to hold that a wife can override her husbands objections to enter a residence? why would they allow the marital unit to be subjectively divided in cases where domestic abuse is not an issue?

Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas are scary when it comes to police and government power. If Scalia had his way, he would overturn Miranda.

 

[Digitonomy]

I tend to agree with the decision, but I can also see CJ Roberts’s point about how this is not a very clear rule:

“What the majority’s rule protects is not so much privacy as the good luck of a co-owner who just happens to be present at the door when the police arrive.”
Source

I also got a kick out of Stevens and Scalia trading barbs:

Stevens wrote a concurrence using the case to point out what he saw as a flaw in Scalia’s preferred method of resolving cases, which is to divine the “original” meaning of constitutional provisions.

The Randolph case, Stevens said, could be resolved only by looking at “evolving” social standards. Only in modern times have women been recognized as equal partners in households, Stevens said. When the Fourth Amendment was written, “only the consent of the husband would matter” because women had lesser rights.

Scalia wrote to respond specifically to Stevens’ charge. What had changed, he noted, were laws governing property rights, not the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Stevens had confused the “original import of the Fourth Amendment with the background sources of law to which the Amendment, on its original meaning, referred.”