.jpg)
In an earlier case, Michigan v. Summers, decided in the
early 1980s, the Supreme Court held that when police are executing a search
warrant the police are entitled to temporarily hold people they discover on the
premises even if they do not have a reason to suspect them of engaging in any
wrongdoing.
This issue was tested in 2005
when police in Wyandanch, NY arrested a man, Chunon Bailey, even though he had
already left the premises before any police arrived to search the building.
Furthermore, Mr. Bailey was not stopped on the property in question, but was
instead found a mile away from the house. Police officers who stopped Bailey
found evidence that linked him to drugs and a weapon found in the house they
were sent to search.
On Tuesday, the Court voted 6-3
to refuse to extend the principle laid out in 1981 to the facts of the present
case. The justices agreed that the distance, in both time and geography, were
too great to allow police the same authority found in the previously decided
case. Justice Kennedy wrote that the practical necessities for why an officer
might need to detain someone on the premises during a search disappear when
that person is a great distance from the scene of the search.
Kennedy elaborated on the problem
with allowing such a detention away from the premises. He said that the
extraordinary intrusion on personal liberty would be even greater in such a
circumstance given that the person would be stopped in public and then be
forced to go back to the premises of the search, giving an outward appearance
that the subject had been arrested.
The case resulted in a very odd
voting alliance among the justices. Besides Kennedy, Roberts, and Scalia joined
with Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan to form the majority. Thomas and
Alito, two staunch conservatives, joined Justice Breyer in dissenting.
See Our Related Blog Posts:
No comments:
Post a Comment