20, 2015, when a Cranston couple - Edward A. “The Fourth Amendment has always served as an important barrier to police intrusion into the home, and we are very pleased that the court reaffirmed this fundamental principle.” “Today’s court decision is an extremely important victory for privacy rights,” Rhode Island ACLU executive director Steven Brown said. The Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had filed a legal brief in the case, praised Monday’s ruling. But, he said, “What is reasonable for vehicles is different from what is reasonable for homes.” Thomas noted that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit all unwelcome intrusions on private property - only “unreasonable” ones.
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“A recognition of the existence of ‘community caretaking’ tasks, like rendering aid to motorists in disabled vehicles, is not an open-ended license to perform them anywhere.”
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“The very core of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee is the right of a person to retreat into his or her home and ‘there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion,’ ” he wrote. The Colorado Attorney General’s Office has declined to publicly comment.But Thomas said that searches of homes and vehicles are different from a constitutional standpoint. “I think it sends a message to law enforcement agencies.there are limits to what can be done as far as surveilling people.” “It’s a good day for folks in Colorado who value their privacy,” Robert Borquez, who represents Tafoya, told KRDO after the decision came down. “If a police officer had manned the utility pole for three continuous months, obviously Tafoya would have noticed,” Chief Justice Boatright quipped. Moreover, the very fact that the pole camera went undetected further bolstered Tafoya’s argument that his expectation of privacy was reasonable.
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Since that area was “visible through gaps in Tafoya’s fence, from a particular spot on the stairway of an adjacent building, and from the utility pole itself,” this “public exposure” made it “unreasonable for Tafoya to expect privacy” in his own yard.īut as the Colorado Supreme Court countered, “any typical public exposure of the area would be fleeting”: “This argument ignores the improbability that a neighbor would peer through a gap in a privacy fence or stand on his or her outdoor stairway for three months at a time.” The state, however, argued that surveilling Tafoya’s yard wasn’t a search. The Colorado Supreme Court further found the “extended duration and continuity” of the pole-camera surveillance to be “constitutionally significant,” since it “involved a degree of intrusion that a reasonable person would not have anticipated.” “Society would not expect law enforcement to undertake this kind of ‘pervasive tracking’ of the activities occurring in one’s curtilage,” Boatright added.
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Supreme Court has long considered “part of the home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes.” Supreme Court precedent, unless officers physically enter a person’s property, a “search” only occurs “when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.” But if a court decides there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, government agents are free to monitor and intrude, unbound by the Fourth Amendment.įor Tafoya’s case, the Colorado Supreme Court noted that his yard was surrounded by a six-foot-high privacy fence and was “significantly set back from the street, so a person standing on the street could not see into the backyard.” So while police didn’t surveil into his home directly, they still spied on his “curtilage,” which the U.S.