The California State Supreme Court reached a decision
in late July on one of the more interesting cases to come the Court’s way. The vote was four to three, indicating a
significant split, and the issue is as follows: Does a police officer who walks onto a private lawn, looks
inside a bedroom and sees drug activity, have the right to search the house
without a warrant? The State Supreme
Court said no. The Court acknowledged
that a guilty person was being set free, however, indicated that it is more
important that Constitutional liberties be upheld.
In this case, several police officers came to the
home of Cayetano Camacho in June of 1997, having received an anonymous
complaint about noise. The officers
arrived at the scene and did not hear loud noise emanating from his house or
anywhere in the area. They could have
knocked on Mr. Camacho’s door; however, they chose not to. Instead, they walked into his yard and
looked into his bedroom and saw Mr. Camacho busily bagging cocaine.
In dissent, Chief Justice Ronald George argued that
Mr. Camacho had no expectation of privacy, for he did nothing to attempt
to create privacy for himself. He did
not have blinds or curtains covering the window, and in reality, anyone
standing on the lawn and looking in could see what the officers saw. Chief Justice George indicated that what was
happening in Mr. Camacho’s bedroom could be seen by anyone, including
neighbors, standing on the lawn.
The majority concluded that whatever the neighbors
could or could not see, the officers had no right to be where they were. It’s not like they could see what they saw
from the street, and they did have the option of knocking on his door to check
out the noise complaint. They chose not
to do so; they walked over to a window, looked in, and saw Mr. Camacho and his
cocaine.
Let me make clear that Mr. Camacho is clearly no
Rhodes scholar. I would think that
anyone engaging in such activity would invest in blinds or curtains or at least
take some scotch tape and a towel and cover up the window rather than put
oneself in a position where anyone looking inside the window could see the
criminal activity that was taking place.
However, the law does not require one to be a Rhodes scholar, and the fact
that Mr. Camacho was engaged in criminal activity was secondary to the
fact that the police officers had no right to be where they were. If they have no right to see it, it doesn’t
get seen.
One of the aspects of criminal law that bothers
people I talk to from time to time is that those who are guilty of crimes are
sometimes freed because things were not done in a constitutional fashion. To me, this is the strength of our
system. You either do things right or
you don’t get to keep the fruits of what you’ve done. If a police officer knows that no matter how he does something,
the person is going to end up in jail, there is no motivation for the police
officer to do things the right way.
There are many countries that allow officers to do
what they want to do, and the individual, in effect, has no rights. That is not the case here. In this country, I am happy and proud to
say, even though the guilty person gets to go free once in a while, our rights
are protected, and therefore police officers are motivated to do the right
thing, and do it the right way. It is
important to keep that motivation present so that officers will continue to
strive to reach the difficult balance between engaging in appropriate and
meaningful police activity and doing it in such a way as to not impinge on the
rights of the individual. Sometimes it
means that the guilty go free, and this is one of those times. It is my belief that the alternative would
be far worse.