The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that warrantless firearms seizures from Americans’ homes are illegal, siding with a Rhode Island man whose guns were seized without a warrant after his wife raised concerns that he could harm himself.
According to Caniglia v Strom, a lower court had earlier ruled that police confiscating weapons without a warrant came under the Fourth Amendment’s “community caretaking” exception, but that decision was reversed by a 9-0 decision by the nation’s highest court.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the unanimous opinion declaring that although law enforcement officers will perform “many civic tasks in modern society,” they do not have “an open-ended license to perform them anywhere.”
“The very core of the Fourth Amendment…right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable search and seizure.” Thomas wrote.
According to Forbes, there are some exceptions to the 4th Amendment, such as “exigent circumstances.” For example, if an officer notices someone trying to shoot another person through a window of a house, he or she has the legal authority to breach the house to stop the attack.
Another exception, on which this case was focused, is what’s known as “community caretaking.” The Supreme Court previously decided that police should conduct “community caretaking functions totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to a criminal statute” without a warrant, citing a scenario in which police seized a gun from the trunk of an impounded vehicle without a warrant.
“In reaching this conclusion, the Court noted that the officers who patrol the ‘public highways’ are often called to discharge noncriminal ‘community caretaking functions,’ such as responding to disabled vehicles or investigating accidents. But searches of vehicles and homes are constitutionally different, as the Cady opinion repeatedly stressed,” Thomas wrote in the court’s opinion.
Mr. Caniglia and his wife were fighting in the court when he put an empty rifle on their table and said, “shoot me now and get it over with.” Following the dispute, Caniglia’s wife dialed the non-emergency phone number, which resulted in a police visit. While disagreeing that Mr. Caniglia’s behavior was “abnormal” or “agitated,” the police persuaded him to go to the hospital for psychiatric treatment.
Mr. Caniglia’s wife informed the police when her husband was on his way to the hospital about two pistols he had in the house. The policemen searched the house without a warrant and Mrs. Caniglia was unable to give legitimate consent because the police lied and told her that Mr. Caniglia had consented to the recovery of his weapons.
Following the cops’ discovery and seizure of the two weapons, Mr. Caniglia filed a lawsuit against the police for supposedly breaching his 4th Amendment rights.
In a concurring opinion with the ruling, Justice Samuel Alito discussed current “red flag” laws that often bring into questions Fourth Amendment rights.
“This case also implicates another body of law that petitioner glossed over: the so-called “red flag” laws that some States are now enacting. These laws enable the police to seize guns pursuant to a court order to prevent their use for suicide or the infliction of harm on innocent persons,” Alito wrote.
He went on to say that “they typically specify the standard that must be met and the procedures that must be followed before firearms may be seized.”
“Provisions of red flag laws may be challenged under the Fourth Amendment, and those cases may come before us. Our decision today does not address those issues,” Alito continued.
The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court’s decision in March, claiming that law enforcement’s efforts to seize the petitioner’s weapons without a warrant is “reasonable.”
The Department of Justice’s brief said, “The touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness. For criminal investigations, this Court has generally incorporated the Warrant Clause into the Fourth Amendment’s overarching reasonableness requirement, but it has not generally done so for searches or seizures objectively premised on justifications other than the investigation of wrongdoing.”
“The ultimate question in this case is therefore not whether the respondent officers’ actions fit within some narrow warrant exception, but instead whether those actions were reasonable. And under all the circumstances here, they were,” the brief added.
